Esther
12 books read for LibriVox
- If you've read Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym and felt cheated by that ending, this is Verne picking up the thread, sending Captain Len Guy south to find his lost brother. Slow and log-book methodical in places, but the pull toward that final ice field is real.
- Verne's poking fun at Americans here, and it lands: a club of bored Civil War artillerymen decide to fire a cannon at the moon, and Michel Ardan cheerfully volunteers to ride inside. You'll skim some ballistics math, but the deadpan enthusiasm carries you right through.
- Verne at his most cheerful: a half-eaten note in a bottle sends Lord Glenarvan's crew chasing the 37th parallel around the globe, and the scatterbrained geographer Paganel (who boarded the wrong ship entirely) steals every scene. Pure adventure, earthquakes and condors included, no deep themes required.
- 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 get the pleasure of being trapped in a tiny projectile with Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan, whose arguments and practical ingenuity keep the lunar voyage lively. The science is wonderfully speculative and often dated, but the cramped camaraderie and odd technical details make this a charming, slightly eccentric read.
- South! non-fictionShackleton writes like a ship's log, flat and matter-of-fact, which somehow makes it worse when the ice crushes the Endurance and better when the little James Caird survives the open Southern Ocean. If you like your courage understated, this is that in book form.
- Leacock pokes fun at the small-town Mariposans so gently you end up loving them, and the chapter where the steamer Mariposa Belle sinks in about six feet of water is genuinely funny. Fair warning, nothing much happens here, which is exactly the point.
- You get a wonderfully odd Arctic adventure: Captain Hobson’s Hudson’s Bay expedition finds its fort stranded on a floating ice island, while Mrs. Paulina Barnett keeps up her observations and nerve. The pacing is patient and the geography-heavy detail is part of the bargain.
- You get a wonderfully unusual river journey here: Joam Garral and his family travel down the Amazon on an enormous floating farm, while a buried mystery shadows the celebration. It’s leisurely and full of period geography, but the raft, the river, and the family tension stay with you.
- Poe's only novel, and it's a strange one: what starts as a boy stowing away on a whaler slides into mutiny, starvation, and lots drawn among desperate men, then keeps getting weirder. If you like stories that end tidily, skip it; if you like a fever dream, go.
- 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.