Alan Mapstone
21 books read for LibriVox
- Marlowe writes a king who wrecks his kingdom for love of Gaveston and somehow makes you pity him more as he loses everything. It's bleak, cruel in places, and the deposition scenes cut deep.
- You get a rough, episodic history play with flashes of Shakespearean energy, especially in Edward’s pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury and the Black Prince’s battlefield speeches. It’s uneven and not wholly Shakespeare’s, but the mix of courtly temptation, war, and sudden moral seriousness makes it an intriguing afternoon read.
- Shaw having fun with his own critics: a young woman's play gets staged anonymously, then actual reviewers bicker over who wrote it. Inside, two respectable kids come home from jail refusing to feel ashamed, and their parents' panic is funnier than it has any right to be.
- Forget the scandal, it's really about Connie coming back to life in that gamekeeper's hut while Clifford talks coal profits up at the house. Lawrence preaches a bit, he can't help it, but the tenderness is real and it lands if you let it.
- Bernard starts out half feral, raised by bandit uncles in a crumbling castle, and Edmée basically refuses to love him until he makes himself worth loving, which takes years. If you like romance that's really about a person slowly being rebuilt, this is unusually satisfying.
- You get Mary Shelley’s darker, stranger side here, especially in “The Mortal Immortal,” where an alchemist’s mistake turns a love story into a meditation on outliving everyone you know. The stories can feel uneven and theatrically gothic, but their loneliness, moral unease, and fascination with bodies that refuse to behave stay with you.
- Three con artists set up shop in a plague-emptied London house and fleece everyone who knocks, and watching Face and Subtle improvise faster and faster as the marks pile up is genuinely funny. The Jacobean language takes some chewing, but the scheming underneath is pure farce.
- You get absurd political satire, shameless wordplay, and the wonderfully slippery Peisetairus, who talks a flock of birds into imagining a new city in the sky. It’s bawdy, strange, and occasionally more interested in a joke than a tidy plot, but the chorus and wild premise make it unusually vivid on the page.
- The Bolshevik Myth non-fictionYou get a painfully firsthand account of Berkman’s journey through Soviet Russia, from early hope to growing disillusionment. His visits to prisons, encounters with workers, and sharp self-criticism make it compelling reading, though the political detail can feel repetitive.
- Fair warning, this is decadent verse cranked all the way up: skulls, worms, and a poet so bored with the universe he sneers at his own book. If you have a soft spot for Baudelaire-drunk gloom that occasionally tips into camp, it's a strange, morbid little pleasure.
- The Wife of Bath alone is worth the price of admission, bragging about outliving five husbands before her story even starts. It's rowdy, gossipy, sometimes flat-out filthy, and the Middle English takes patience, so grab a good modern edition and read it out loud.
- You get an unusually tender eighteenth-century comedy, where Bevil’s decency matters more than clever plotting and Tom and Phillis keep the earnestness from becoming airless. It’s slow and openly sentimental, but its concern with kindness, duty, and emotional restraint still feels surprisingly intimate.
- You get a filthy, sharply engineered Restoration comedy, with Horner’s fake impotence setting off Pinchwife’s paranoid jealousy and Margery’s blunt country innocence. The sexual politics are ugly in places, but the wordplay and social hypocrisy stay wonderfully alive if you enjoy comedy with teeth.
- Every character is named for exactly what they are (Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Giant Despair), which sounds heavy-handed until you're stuck in the Slough of Despond yourself and it lands.
- Gossip as blood sport, and Sheridan makes every barb land. The screen scene, where Lady Teazle's hiding spot collapses in front of everyone, is still genuinely funny after 250 years.
- You'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.
- You get an unusual, slightly lopsided Shakespeare play here, with Palamon and Arcite’s fierce friendship turning into rivalry over Emilia, while the Jailer's Daughter brings a surprisingly tender, earthy counterpoint. The verse shifts between Shakespearean weight and Fletcher’s brisker comedy, so its strangeness is part of the appeal.
- You’re glad you read it for the strange intimacy of spending a day inside Leopold Bloom’s mind, where errands, advertisements, hunger, and memory keep turning unexpectedly funny and tender. It’s demanding and occasionally maddening, but the jokes, wordplay, and Molly Bloom’s closing monologue reward patience.