Delmar H Dolbier
18 libri letti per LibriVox
- A Woman of No Importance EnglishWilde lets his idle aristocrats trade epigrams for two acts, and Lord Illingworth is horribly quotable, then the play turns serious when Mrs Arbuthnot's old secret surfaces. If you want pure froth you might resist the melodrama, but the wit alone earns the evening.
- Coriolanus EnglishYou get a fiercely strange tragedy about pride, hunger, and the impossibility of speaking to people you despise. Coriolanus is magnificent and maddening, while Volumnia’s hard, hungry love gives the play its deepest ache; the Roman politics can feel blunt, but the language cuts.
- Hamilton EnglishA Hamilton play a century before the musical: George Arliss's stage vehicle about the funding fight and the Reynolds blackmail, built for strong curtain lines. Creaky in places, brisk in most, and fascinating as what 1917 wanted its founders to be.
- Heartbreak House EnglishMostly it's clever people lounging in a house shaped like a ship, talking circles around each other while old Captain Shotover mutters prophecies from the corner, and somehow that's the fun. If you like Shaw's talk more than plot, this is him at his strangest, with a jolt at the end.
- Hippolytus EnglishYou get a painfully human tragedy out of Phaedra’s attempt to live honorably while desire and divine spite close in around her. Hippolytus is austere, self-righteous, and oddly moving, and the play’s argument between Aphrodite and Artemis leaves you thinking about purity, shame, and who gets punished for wanting.
- Misalliance EnglishFair warning, almost nothing happens except talk, but the talk is so good you won't mind: an airplane crashes into a rich underwear magnate's greenhouse mid-argument, and out steps a Polish acrobat who upends everyone. If you like watching smug people get dismantled in conversation, this is a treat.
- Philoctetes EnglishShort enough to read in an evening, and it stays with you: a man abandoned on an island for ten years with a stinking wound, and young Neoptolemus slowly realizing he can't stomach the lie Odysseus wants him to tell. If you like watching a conscience wake up, this is it.
- You get a wonderfully unsettling theatre rehearsal where six unfinished characters interrupt the actors and insist their suffering is more real than performance. It’s funny, argumentative, and deliberately slippery, especially if you enjoy questions about identity and art more than tidy emotional resolution.
- Tarzan the Untamed EnglishYou get Tarzan at his most grief-driven here: after finding his estate destroyed and Jane apparently dead, he turns vengeance loose across wartime Africa. The action is brisk and vividly pulpy, though the racist wartime caricatures and colonial assumptions can make this a difficult read.
- The Four Feathers EnglishHarry Feversham gets branded a coward before he's done anything, and the book is his slow, secret answer to it, one returned feather at a time. It's earnest Edwardian adventure with a surprisingly tender heart, especially around Durrance, and it rewards a patient reader.
- The House of the Wolfings EnglishFair warning, Morris writes in deliberately old-fashioned prose that keeps breaking into verse, so it asks patience. But Thiodolf's choice, between a charmed hauberk that saves his life and the good of his folk, has real weight, and you can feel Tolkien taking notes.
- The Magician EnglishEarly Maugham slumming it in gothic horror, and it's fun: Oliver Haddo is a bloated, sneering occultist modeled on Aleister Crowley, and watching him slowly pull Margaret away from her sensible fiancé gets genuinely creepy. Pulpier than his later stuff, so come for atmosphere, not subtlety.
- The Octopus EnglishYou get a sprawling, angry novel about California wheat farmers crushed between drought, debt, and the railroad, with Presley observing while Magnus Derrick and Buck Annixter fight back in very different ways. It can be melodramatic and grim, but its landscapes and sense of economic violence stay with you.
- The Pit EnglishYou get a vivid taste of Chicago’s wheat market, where Curtis Jadwin’s appetite for speculation starts reshaping his marriage to Laura. Norris can be melodramatic and heavy on market mechanics, but the pressure feels real, and Laura’s intelligence and unease give the novel more bite than its finance plot suggests.
- You get a wonderfully companionable mix of travel sketches, ghostly tales, and gentle satire, with Geoffrey Crayon wandering through English inns and Christmas customs before giving you Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. It moves leisurely, but the wit and homesick warmth make it easy to settle into.
- The Taming of the Shrew EnglishThe fun is watching Kate and Petruchio trade insults at full speed, two clever people who've finally met their match. Fair warning, the "taming" itself sits uneasily now, and Kate's last speech will either charm you or make you argue with the page.
- Timon of Athens EnglishYou’ll appreciate its strange, abrasive energy: Timon’s lavish generosity curdles into furious contempt, while Apemantus needles him with the honesty nobody else will risk. It’s a jagged, unfinished-feeling play, but if you like Shakespeare when he’s bitter, funny, and morally unruly, it stays with you.
- Tono-Bungay EnglishForget the Martians, this is Wells writing about his own world: George watching his uncle puff a worthless tonic into a fortune, and the whole rickety empire of advertising and borrowed money wobbling underneath. Funny and sad at once, and weirdly current about how hype works.