Denny Sayers (d. 2015)
25 books read for LibriVox
- You follow a London saddler through the plague of 1665, counting the weekly death bills, watching houses get shut up, hearing the dead-cart in the street, and it feels unnervingly like reportage, not fiction. No real plot, so come for the eerie, patient detail.
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman non-fictionYou get a fierce, clear-minded argument that women are made dependent by bad education, not born foolish, with Wollstonecraft taking aim at fashionable “sensibility,” empty marriage, and the polite training of girls. The prose can feel dense, but her impatience and common sense still make the book feel startlingly alive.
- 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 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 brutal, strange study of pride and love, with Lear raging on the heath while his Fool keeps puncturing the grandeur. It’s bleak and sometimes deliberately difficult, but the language keeps opening up new depths each time you return to it.
- You watch Louise de Chaulieu and Renée de Maucombe write themselves into opposite ideas of womanhood, one chasing passionate feeling, the other building a life through marriage and motherhood. The letters can feel talky, but Balzac makes their intimacy, rivalry, and changing self-knowledge quietly absorbing.
- Moll narrates her own crimes and marriages like a shopkeeper doing inventory, and her total lack of shame becomes weirdly endearing. The prose runs on without chapter breaks and can feel like one long confession, but if you like a shrewd, unsentimental survivor, she's good company.
- 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 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’ll enjoy dipping into this rather than reading it straight through: Bierce turns words like “love,” “war,” and “politics” into tiny, beautifully sharpened traps. It’s funny, mean, and often startlingly modern, though some entries are dated or cruel enough to make you wince.
- Hell is the fun part, honestly: Dante keeps fainting, Virgil keeps steadying him, and old enemies get named and shamed in the ice. It asks patience (Paradiso gets very abstract), but as a walk through one man's whole moral universe, nothing else feels like it.
- These are quiet poems, shepherds trading songs while real grief hums underneath, like Meliboeus losing his farm while Tityrus lounges in the shade. If you can slow down enough, the melancholy under all that green is lovely; if you need plot, skip it.
- You get a viciously funny, morally rotten theatrical ride through Barabas’s schemes, where everyone’s greed and hypocrisy keep feeding his ingenuity. The play is bluntly antisemitic in places, so it needs some historical distance, but its black comedy and gleeful distrust of piety still feel startlingly alive.
- 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 a strange, funny, sometimes brutal journey home, but the real pleasure is watching Penelope and Telemachus hold their lives together while Odysseus keeps meeting monsters, gods, and his own cleverness. The episodic structure takes patience, yet its images and voices stay wonderfully vivid.
- The Origin of Species non-fictionYou get a patient, surprisingly companionable argument built from pigeons, barnacles, fossils, and the awkward facts natural selection has to explain. The prose is dense and sometimes repetitive, but reading Darwin think his way through objections makes the living world look less fixed and more wonderfully negotiable.
- Pure swashbuckle done with real bite: Sir Oliver gets betrayed by his own brother, sold to the galleys, and comes back as a Barbary corsair with a grudge you can taste. Sabatini's prose is a bit ornate, but the revenge plot moves like a knife.
- The fun here is the straight face: the Baron rides a cannonball and ties his horse to a church steeple in a snowdrift, and never once winks at you. Short, silly episodes, perfect for dipping into, less so if you need a plot to hold onto.
- You get a sharp, surprisingly funny way to see status games everywhere, from conspicuous clothing to expensive entertainments and the social value of doing nothing. Veblen’s prose is dense and sometimes repetitive, but his dry irony rewards patience, especially when you recognize “pecuniary emulation” in modern life.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Addams writes like someone thinking out loud about why comfortable idealism wasn't enough, and her account of ditching the "snare of preparation" to actually move in among Chicago's immigrant poor still stings a little. Slow and earnest in places, but her honesty about her own mistakes keeps it human.