Anna Simon
32 books read for LibriVox
- You spend the whole play watching Nora play the giggling little wife Torvald wants, sneaking macaroons and dancing the tarantella, while something underneath tightens like a wire. It reads fast, feels a bit stagey at first, then that final scene lands and stays with you.
- You have to enjoy slow, demanding arguments, but Kant gives moral life a bracing seriousness: the good will matters more than results, and freedom means giving yourself a law you can rationally stand behind. The sections on the moral law and the postulates reward patient rereading.
- Chichikov rides around buying up dead serfs from provincial landowners, and every one of them (dreamy Manilov, miserly Plyushkin) is funnier and sadder than the last. It's absurd, digressive, and unfinished, which somehow suits it.
- 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.
- Essays non-fictionMalatesta writes like a patient friend arguing at a café table, not a theorist showing off, so pieces on organization, violence, and why anarchy takes will rather than waiting suit you if you like plain moral reasoning. Expect polemic and repetition, not lyricism.
- You find a severe, strangely liberating book here: Spinoza’s definitions and proofs lead from God or Nature to emotions, desire, and the hard-won freedom of understanding why you act. The geometric format is dry at first, but its account of jealousy, sadness, and steadiness feels remarkably intimate.
- Collins is angry in this one, at marriage laws that could trap a woman on a technicality, and at brawny athlete-worship, and the anger drives it. Anne Silvester's plight genuinely tightens your chest, though you'll have to forgive him a few sermons along the way.
- You’d enjoy this if you like romantic novels that keep questioning romance: Modeste’s letters to the poet Canalis are tender, clever, and tangled up with literary vanity, while her father’s ruined fortunes add real pressure. It’s talky and socially observant, with Balzac gently exposing how people perform love before they understand it.
- Magdalen Vanstone loses her whole inheritance on a legal technicality and decides to scheme it back, disguises and sham marriage included, and you spend the whole book rooting for someone doing genuinely dubious things. Captain Wragge, her con-artist accomplice, nearly steals it.
- Ayesha is the reason to go: a two-thousand-year-old queen who talks philosophy while casually terrifying everyone, and she gets stranger the closer you look. The Victorian adventure trappings creak a bit (and the colonial attitudes with them), but the ending in the caves genuinely unsettles.
- South! non-fictionShackleton writes like a ship's log, flat and matter-of-fact, which somehow makes it worse when the ice crushes the Endurance and better when the little James Caird survives the open Southern Ocean. If you like your courage understated, this is that in book form.
- You spend time with the tender, maddening Ranevskaya and the newly wealthy Lopakhin, as everyone talks around the fate of the estate and avoids the decisions that might save it. It’s quietly funny and deeply sad, with the strange feeling of hearing laughter in a house already beginning to empty.
- If you're in the mood for pure between-the-wars pulp, this moves fast: a blackmail syndicate killing off rich men, a showy psychic detective, and dumpy Inspector Parr, whom everyone underestimates. Thalia Drummond alone, apparently crooked and never quite readable, makes the guessing game worth it.
- Ten young Florentines wait out the plague by telling each other stories, and most of them are funnier and filthier than you'd expect from the 1300s, full of scheming friars and wives outwitting dull husbands. Dip in and out; nobody reads all hundred straight through.
- You follow Andrzej Kmicic, a reckless, compromised nobleman whose swagger keeps colliding with his better instincts, through war, loyalty, and political chaos. It’s long, melodramatic, and proudly Polish, but the battles, reversals, and sheer force of Kmicic’s personality reward you if you settle into its pace.
- These are quiet poems, shepherds trading songs while real grief hums underneath, like Meliboeus losing his farm while Tityrus lounges in the shade. If you can slow down enough, the melancholy under all that green is lovely; if you need plot, skip it.
- You get a wonderfully odd Edwardian adventure: Theodore Racksole buys the Grand Babylon Hotel because its chef refuses to serve his daughter a steak, then finds Nella tangled in kidnappings, secret passages, and European intrigue. It moves briskly and cheerfully, with more theatrical fun than psychological depth.
- Fair warning, it's long and blood-soaked, and the battle scenes name every man who falls. But underneath is Achilles wrecked by grief, and that scene where Priam kneels before his son's killer will stay with you; if you can handle slow patches, it earns everything.
- 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.
- You get a viciously funny, morally rotten theatrical ride through Barabas’s schemes, where everyone’s greed and hypocrisy keep feeding his ingenuity. The play is bluntly antisemitic in places, so it needs some historical distance, but its black comedy and gleeful distrust of piety still feel startlingly alive.
- You follow Emily St Aubert from sunlit France into the oppressive corridors of Udolpho, where music, shadows, and a black veil keep your nerves pleasantly busy. It’s long, ornate, and sometimes dramatically overwrought, but the atmosphere is so carefully sustained that the castle starts haunting you too.
- You get a mischievous lecture from Folly herself, who praises everyone from vain scholars to pompous theologians while quietly exposing their absurdities. It’s witty, pointed, and occasionally dense, so you’ll enjoy it most when you’re happy to linger over Renaissance arguments and jokes that still land.
- 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 Social Contract non-fictionYou get a bracing argument about political freedom, especially in Rousseau’s insistence that obeying laws you help make is different from submitting to a ruler. The prose can feel abstract and combative, but his questions about inequality, citizenship, and the general will keep needling you afterward.
- The Subjection of Women non-fictionFair warning, this is a Victorian philosopher building an argument, not telling a story, but Mill dismantles every excuse for keeping women legally powerless with such patient, dry logic that you keep wanting to cheer. Striking how much of it still lands a century and a half later.
- You get a sharp, surprisingly funny way to see status games everywhere, from conspicuous clothing to expensive entertainments and the social value of doing nothing. Veblen’s prose is dense and sometimes repetitive, but his dry irony rewards patience, especially when you recognize “pecuniary emulation” in modern life.
- 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 Voyage of the Beagle non-fictionYoung Darwin is such good company here, riding with gauchos, poking at fossil bones in Patagonia, puzzling over Galápagos finches without knowing yet what they mean. It's a rambling travel journal, so skim freely, but his curiosity about everything is genuinely infectious.
- Verne in a mischievous mood: the same gun club from the moon adventure buys the North Pole and plans to tilt the Earth's axis with one colossal cannon shot, and nobody stops to ask if they should. Short, dry, and funnier than his reputation suggests, though heavy on arithmetic.
- 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.