Ben Tucker
8 books read for LibriVox
- 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.
- You get stories that are compact but morally unsettling, especially “In a Grove,” where conflicting testimonies make certainty feel almost absurd, and “Hell Screen,” whose artist’s devotion turns horrifying. Akutagawa is dry, sharp, and often bleak, so this suits you if ambiguity stays interesting after the last page.
- You follow Harry Haller, a lonely, self-dramatizing intellectual who despises the bourgeois world while secretly needing its warmth. The novel gets increasingly strange, especially in the Treatise and the Magic Theater, and its messy argument with despair feels more honest than comforting.
- Fair warning, this is opium-dream prose, fragments rather than a story, but the piece on the three Ladies of Sorrow will stay lodged in you, and his grief for his dead sister is raw under all the ornate sentences. Read it slowly, at night, in pieces.
- Pure 1920s pulp, and it knows it: a locked tomb, scattered keys, and Dr. Stalletti, one of Wallace's genuinely creepy villains, doing unspeakable things in a dark house. Read it fast on a rainy night and don't ask the plot to hold up in daylight.
- Mostly it's droll Thames-side comedy, skippers and mates scheming over the same girl in the title story, but tucked in among the jokes sit The Monkey's Paw and The Well, which still genuinely chill. Good bedside reading, one story at a time, half grins and the occasional shiver.
- These are London's earliest Klondike stories, so you get the frozen trail before he polished it: Malemute Kid, sled dogs, men making awful choices in forty below. Read one at a time by lamplight; the attitudes are dated in spots, but the cold feels absolutely real.