David Lawrence
25 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.
- 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.
- 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’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 political persuasion at close range: Brutus speaks as if reason can keep a republic clean, while Cassius understands how fear and resentment move people. The funeral speeches are thrilling to read aloud, but the play leaves you with uneasy questions about honor, crowds, and unintended consequences.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- You'll spend most of it wanting to shake Orgon, who's so besotted with his pious houseguest that he ignores everyone, including his sharp-tongued maid Dorine, who steals every scene she's in. It's fast, mean, very funny, and reads in an evening.
- 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.
- 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.
- The comedy bits are light (Portia testing suitors with riddle caskets), but Shylock's "hath not a Jew eyes" speech will sit with you for days. It's uncomfortable, deliberately or not, and that tension is exactly why it's worth arguing about afterward.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 go for the sinister hypnotist Svengali, but what stays with you is bohemian Paris, three British art students, and tone-deaf Trilby herself, warm and doomed. Fair warning, du Maurier rambles and the Svengali caricature is ugly by any modern measure, so read it with eyes open.
- 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.