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8 books read for LibriVox
- Wilde lets his idle aristocrats trade epigrams for two acts, and Lord Illingworth is horribly quotable, then the play turns serious when Mrs Arbuthnot's old secret surfaces. If you want pure froth you might resist the melodrama, but the wit alone earns the evening.
- 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’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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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’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.
- 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.