Bruce Pirie
33 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.
- Tolstoy follows Anna's affair and Levin's awkward farming life in parallel, and somehow the mowing scenes stay with you as long as the tragedy does. It's long and unhurried, but you come out knowing these people better than some of your actual relatives.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Old Grandet counting his gold while his daughter quietly gives hers away to a cousin she loves is the whole tragedy in miniature, and Balzac makes you feel every sou. It's small-town, slow, and sad in a way that stays with you, so don't expect fireworks.
- Joyce's one play, and it's all talk, three people circling the question of whether love can survive total freedom, with Richard almost daring his partner Bertha toward another man. Slow and cerebral in the Ibsen mold, but if you like watching jealousy dissected honestly, it stings.
- You watch young Rastignac learn how Paris actually works, one moral compromise at a time, while old Goriot bankrupts himself for daughters who won't visit. It's bleak and gossipy at once, and the shabby boarding house feels so real you can smell the soup.
- 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.
- Mostly it's clever people lounging in a house shaped like a ship, talking circles around each other while old Captain Shotover mutters prophecies from the corner, and somehow that's the fun. If you like Shaw's talk more than plot, this is him at his strangest, with a jolt at the end.
- 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 a painfully human tragedy out of Phaedra’s attempt to live honorably while desire and divine spite close in around her. Hippolytus is austere, self-righteous, and oddly moving, and the play’s argument between Aphrodite and Artemis leaves you thinking about purity, shame, and who gets punished for wanting.
- 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 settle into its quiet world of snow, woodcutting, church bells, and hard farm labor, where Maria’s choice between François Paradis’s wild freedom and a settled life feels painfully real. It’s spare and melancholy, with the landscape pressing on every page, but its emotional honesty lingers.
- Fair warning, almost nothing happens except talk, but the talk is so good you won't mind: an airplane crashes into a rich underwear magnate's greenhouse mid-argument, and out steps a Polish acrobat who upends everyone. If you like watching smug people get dismantled in conversation, this is a treat.
- Sophocles wrote this near ninety, and it shows in the best way: a blind, exhausted Oedipus finally finding a place that will take him, with Antigone at his elbow. Slower and stranger than Oedipus Rex, but the ending has a quiet awe that stays with you.
- Iago talks to you directly, and the awful thing is you almost enjoy his company while he wrecks a good man's life over a handkerchief and some careful hints. It's painful in the way only watching preventable disaster is, so save it for when you can take that.
- 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.
- Richard talks straight to you from the first speech, so you end up half rooting for a murderer and enjoying it, especially when he woos Anne over her father-in-law's coffin. If you like villains who make you complicit, this moves fast and never apologizes.
- You watch Lucien de Rubempré get pulled between Parisian society and its criminal underside, while Vautrin treats the whole city like a chessboard. The plotting is melodramatic and wonderfully tangled, but you stay for Balzac’s sharp sense of money, vanity, and social dependence.
- You'll spend a lot of pages inside long arguments about God and guilt, and somehow the brothers (gentle Alyosha, tormented Ivan, reckless Dmitri) become people you worry about. Slow, messy, occasionally funny, and Ivan's chapter with the Inquisitor will stay lodged in you for years.
- 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.
- You spend time with Prince Myshkin, whose open-hearted goodness makes every drawing-room conversation more charged, awkward, and dangerous than it first appears. It’s talky, feverish, and sometimes deliberately frustrating, but the tangled pull between Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna, and Rogozhin stays with you because nobody’s motives remain simple.
- You watch Michael Henchard’s pride and remorse slowly tighten around his life, while Elizabeth-Jane grows into someone quietly formidable. The market-town gossip, rough weather, and Hardy’s dry humor make the book feel lived-in, though its patience and bleakness suit a reflective mood more than a brisk read.
- You spend time on an island with Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, where magic, resentment, and theatrical illusion keep changing the ground beneath you. It’s airy and strange rather than tightly plotted, but the movement toward forgiveness gives the play a quietly human weight.
- 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 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.
- 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’ll recognize the ache in Vanya, who has spent his life serving someone else’s work, and in Sonya, quietly carrying on while Astrov dreams of forests and Elena drifts through the room. It’s funny in that painfully human Chekhov way, and its sadness sneaks up on you.