Debra Lynn
7 books read for LibriVox
- Dickens at his angriest and shortest, which helps if his usual sprawl puts you off. You get Gradgrind drilling children into little fact-machines, then watch that philosophy slowly wreck his own daughter, and Bounderby the self-made blowhard is almost worth the price alone.
- Fair warning, the first half is heavy on schoolboy cricket, so it helps if you can enjoy a well-described innings. But stick around, because halfway through Psmith saunters in, monocle and all, and you get to watch Wodehouse discover his best character in real time.
- The first Blandings book, and already Wodehouse has the machine humming: an absent-minded earl pockets a valuable scarab, and two broke Londoners sneak into the castle as servants to steal it back. Light as anything, genuinely funny, and the below-stairs etiquette scenes alone earn their keep.
- You settle into Henry Esmond’s mock memoir as he moves through Restoration England, where Catholic loyalty, ambition, and appetite tangle around the courts of Charles II and James II. It’s long and deliberately old-fashioned, but his vanity and Thackeray’s sharp social comedy reward patience.
- 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.
- Bibbs Sheridan, the frail son who'd rather write poetry than worship his father's roaring factories, is easy to root for, and Tarkington makes you feel that smoke-choked boomtown in your lungs. It moves gently and moralizes a bit, but if you like quiet rebels, this lands.
- You get a sprawling social comedy where Augustus Melmotte bulldozes through London society while Lady Carbury turns ambition into novels. It asks patience with its courtships and financial schemes, but the pleasure lies in watching vanity, decency, and self-deception collide.