Roger Melin
12 libri letti per LibriVox
- An Autobiography EnglishRoosevelt narrates his own life the way he lived it, at full gallop, from a sickly boy building himself up with boxing lessons to ranching in the Dakota Badlands to the White House. Fair warning, he moralizes constantly and skips the painful parts, but the energy is real.
- Can Such Things Be? EnglishBierce writes dread the way a coroner writes reports, dry and precise, which somehow makes an invisible creature flattening the grass in The Damned Thing far worse than any monster described in full. Short, strange stories, best read one or two at a time, preferably at night.
- Erewhon EnglishYou'll come for the strange country where being sick is a crime and stealing gets you sympathy, and stay for the Book of the Machines, which reads like someone worrying about AI in 1872. Fair warning, it's more essay than adventure, but the ideas keep biting.
- In Search of the Castaways EnglishVerne at his most cheerful: a half-eaten note in a bottle sends Lord Glenarvan's crew chasing the 37th parallel around the globe, and the scatterbrained geographer Paganel (who boarded the wrong ship entirely) steals every scene. Pure adventure, earthquakes and condors included, no deep themes required.
- Murder by the Clock EnglishThe victim in this one is murdered, revived, and murdered again before morning, so Lieutenant Valcour must solve a killing that happened twice. King's Manhattan is nervy and theatrical; the gimmick sounds absurd and plays beautifully.
- Roads to Freedom saggistica EnglishRussell walks you through Marx, Bakunin, and the syndicalists so clearly you feel smarter by chapter two, then quietly picks holes in all of them. Written mid-war, it's calm and fair where you'd expect ranting; skip it if you want fire, read it if you want thinking.
- Sister Carrie EnglishDreiser writes flat and unhurried, but watching Hurstwood come apart, from swanky Chicago bar manager to a man counting pennies in New York, gets under your skin like almost nothing else. Carrie's rise is quieter and stranger.
- The Clue EnglishIf you like your mysteries old-fashioned and tidy, this is a cozy one: an heiress dead the night before her wedding, a houseful of polite suspects, and a tiny dropped cachou doing a lot of work. Fleming Stone barely shows up until the end, so come for the puzzle, not the detective.
- The Humbugs of the World saggistica EnglishYes, the great showman himself grousing about frauds, and the irony lands better than you'd expect. He goes after spirit mediums, quack medicines, the Moon Hoax, all in chatty anecdotes, and half the fun is watching him carefully separate his kind of humbug from the cruel kind.
- The Revolt of the Angels EnglishA guardian angel loses his faith by reading too much theology in his ward's library, then knocks around Paris plotting heaven's overthrow with other fallen angels. It's dry, mischievous French satire, more chuckle than thunder, and the ending lands a genuinely wise punch about power.
- The Second Mrs. Tanqueray EnglishYou'll spend the whole play watching Paula fight for a fresh start she half-knows society won't allow her, and it stings because Pinero refuses to make her a villain or a saint. A short read, quietly brutal, better if you like drawing-room drama with teeth.
- The Wings of the Dove EnglishYou need patience for James’s long, winding sentences, but they reward you with astonishing access to Kate Croy’s calculations, Merton Densher’s evasions, and Milly Theale’s vulnerable generosity. The pleasure lies in watching love, money, and conscience blur until you’re unsure whom to pity.