Ernst Pattynama
12 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.
- 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.
- You'll come for the strange country where being sick is a crime and stealing gets you sympathy, and stay for the Book of the Machines, which reads like someone worrying about AI in 1872. Fair warning, it's more essay than adventure, but the ideas keep biting.
- You find a severe, strangely liberating book here: Spinoza’s definitions and proofs lead from God or Nature to emotions, desire, and the hard-won freedom of understanding why you act. The geometric format is dry at first, but its account of jealousy, sadness, and steadiness feels remarkably intimate.
- Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil Deutsch
- 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 Trollope’s dry social comedy at its most pointed, with Elias Gotobed delivering blunt American verdicts on English aristocracy and fox-hunting society while Arabella Trefoil treats courtship as strategy. It’s sprawling and occasionally slow, but rewarding if you enjoy watching manners, money, and marriage expose people.
- Mr. Crawley, a proud, half-broken country curate accused of stealing a twenty-pound cheque, is one of the most painfully real people Trollope ever wrote, and you'll ache for him. It's long and unhurried, but if you like character over plot, this rewards every page.
- 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.
- Gossip as blood sport, and Sheridan makes every barb land. The screen scene, where Lady Teazle's hiding spot collapses in front of everyone, is still genuinely funny after 250 years.
- You watch Konstantin’s wounded ambition, Nina’s hunger for the stage, and Arkadina’s brittle charm collide around a disastrous play and a country estate. It’s funny in the way awkward people can be funny, then quietly painful, especially if you like drama that lets everyone misunderstand one another in painfully recognizable ways.
- 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.