Robin Cotter
7 libros leídos para LibriVox
- Yes, it's huge, and Hugo will stop everything for fifty pages on the Paris sewers, but Jean Valjean lifting that cart, or the bishop handing over his candlesticks, will sit in your chest for years. Skim the digressions if you must; the mercy at the center holds.
- Leacock pokes fun at the small-town Mariposans so gently you end up loving them, and the chapter where the steamer Mariposa Belle sinks in about six feet of water is genuinely funny. Fair warning, nothing much happens here, which is exactly the point.
- Fair warning, it starts slow and stays sad, but watching Lionel Verney lose the whole world one friend at a time is quietly devastating, and Adrian and Raymond are really Shelley grieving Percy and Byron on the page. Read it when you want company in loneliness, not escape.
- You get a strange, funny, sometimes brutal journey home, but the real pleasure is watching Penelope and Telemachus hold their lives together while Odysseus keeps meeting monsters, gods, and his own cleverness. The episodic structure takes patience, yet its images and voices stay wonderfully vivid.
- You get a wonderfully melodramatic Gothic mystery, with hidden passages beneath the Paris Opera, a masked Erik, and Christine caught between fear, pity, and fascination. The narration can be delightfully over-the-top, but the underground atmosphere and Erik’s wounded loneliness linger after the thrills fade.
- Helen slamming her bedroom door against her charming drunk of a husband still feels startling. You get her whole diary, so the mystery widow becomes a woman you actually know, and it's angrier and braver than anything her sisters wrote.
- You get Amory Blaine in all his charm, vanity, hunger, and confusion, stumbling through Princeton, romance, and the aftermath of war. The novel is uneven and sometimes wonderfully overstuffed, but its quick shifts in voice capture what it feels like to outgrow the person you thought you’d become.