Algy Pug
35 books read for LibriVox
- You get a play that keeps changing its mind about love, from the quarrelling lovers in the forest to Bottom blundering through his amateur performance. The language is playful and slippery, and Puck gives the whole thing a mischievous sense that human beings are never quite in control.
- An hour's read that leaves a bruise: a young woman buries her brother knowing it will kill her, and Creon digs in until it costs him everything. If you like arguments where both sides have a point and neither will bend, this is the one.
- These two aren't young lovers, they're middle-aged, vain, magnificent messes who keep wrecking empires over each other, and you half want to shake them. Stay for Enobarbus, the dry-eyed friend whose barge speech about Cleopatra is worth the whole play.
- You 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.
- Come to it for Imogen, who stays clear-eyed and funny while everyone around her behaves appallingly (Iachimo hiding in a trunk to spy on her is genuinely creepy). The plot is a wild tangle, but the last scene, where every secret unravels at once, is weirdly satisfying.
- 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.
- Fair warning, this is grief held at a scream for most of its length, Electra pacing outside the palace refusing to let her father's murder go quiet. But when she cradles the urn she believes holds her brother's ashes, the scene wrecks you every time.
- Fair warning, this one is bleak: Mrs. Alving has spent years protecting her dead husband's reputation, and you watch the cost of that lie come due in a single day. Short, tense, and quietly furious about respectability.
- You’ll like it for its grand, ceremonial feel and the sharp human cost beneath the pageantry, especially in Katherine of Aragon’s dignity and Wolsey’s sudden collapse. It’s episodic and more interested in public power than intimate character, so expect a stately history play rather than another Hamlet.
- 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.
- You get a sharp, funny argument about whether moral goodness can survive without money, as Major Barbara wrestles with her arms-dealing father, Andrew Undershaft. Shaw gives you brilliant talk rather than much action, and the play keeps unsettling your sympathies long after the jokes land.
- You watch Medea turn her intelligence and rhetorical skill against a city that has already decided she is disposable. The Nurse’s fearful opening and the Chorus’s uneasy sympathy make the play feel intimate, tense, and morally uncomfortable, not like a tidy revenge story.
- Short 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.
- Poe's poems are best read aloud at night, when the hypnotic drumbeat of The Raven and the sad chime of Annabel Lee can really work on you. It's a small body of work, moody and musical, and if gothic melancholy isn't your thing, skip it.
- You get a wonderfully playable comedy here, with Tony Lumpkin stirring up trouble and Kate Hardcastle disguising herself as a barmaid to find out what Marlow is really like. The plotting is deliberately tangled and theatrical, but the dialogue stays bright, mischievous, and surprisingly sharp about shyness and social performance.
- 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 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 Shaw’s particular pleasure from watching Dr. Ridgeon argue about who deserves saving, while the charming, unscrupulous artist Louis Dubedat exposes how quickly medical ethics become vanity and self-interest. It’s talky and deliberately provocative, best if you enjoy ideas sparring onstage more than tidy drama.
- A vain little nobody blows into a corrupt town, gets mistaken for a government inspector, and just rolls with it, borrowing money from every trembling official in sight. You'll read it in an evening, laugh at Khlestakov's shameless lying, then notice the satire still lands on people you know.
- 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 get why people still quote it once Mephistopheles calmly admits he's in hell right now, standing there. The middle sags into slapstick with popes and horse traders, honestly, but Faustus watching his last hour tick away is worth the whole slim thing.
- Early, slight, and a bit lumpy (the ending will make you yelp), but Launce's monologues to his stone-faced dog Crab are some of the funniest pages Shakespeare wrote, and Julia in disguise carries real ache. Read it if you like watching genius warm up.
- 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.
- The plot is a tangle (everyone agrees, don't fight it), but you read this for Mirabell and Millamant bargaining over marriage like two lawyers who happen to be in love. If you like your romance conducted entirely through wit, this is the good stuff.
- You get a darkly funny, claustrophobic family drama where Gregers Werle’s hunger for absolute truth collides with Hjalmar Ekdal’s comforting self-deceptions. The wild duck in the attic feels oddly central, and the play keeps asking whether honesty heals people or simply gives suffering a cleaner name.
- You get Shakespeare at his strangest here: Leontes’ jealousy makes the early scenes painfully claustrophobic, then Paulina’s fierce intelligence and a sudden pastoral brightness change the air. It’s uneven and openly theatrical, but its movement from damage toward forgiveness stays with you.
- Not much happens, which is the point: three sisters keep saying they'll go to Moscow and you slowly realize they never will. If you can sit with that ache, the Prozorov house, Natasha quietly taking it over room by room, will stay with you for years.
- You’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.
- Fair warning, this is Shakespeare at his most lurid, a revenge spiral that keeps outdoing its own cruelty, and Aaron might be his most gleefully unrepentant villain. If you like your tragedy pulpy and unhinged rather than stately, you'll have a grim good time.
- You get Shakespeare at his most sour and slippery here: Troilus and Cressida’s love story keeps colliding with Pandarus’s bawdy meddling, while Ulysses and Hector make the Trojan War feel tawdry rather than heroic. It’s strange, funny, and deliberately hard to settle into, but richly rewarding.
- 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.
- Shaw in a genuinely sunny mood, which is rarer than you'd think. A broke dentist falls hard for a woman raised to be immune to romance, her chaotic twin siblings cause havoc, and a hotel waiter named William quietly out-wises everyone.