Kalynda
11 books read for LibriVox
- Chichikov rides around buying up dead serfs from provincial landowners, and every one of them (dreamy Manilov, miserly Plyushkin) is funnier and sadder than the last. It's absurd, digressive, and unfinished, which somehow suits it.
- Nesbit gets uncharacteristically tender here: Dickie, a lame boy from a Deptford slum, plants some odd seeds and wakes up in Jacobean England, whole and wanted. It's sadder and quieter than her usual romps, and the choice he faces at the end will stay with you.
- 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.
- Yes, it's huge, and Hugo will stop everything for fifty pages on the Paris sewers, but Jean Valjean lifting that cart, or the bishop handing over his candlesticks, will sit in your chest for years. Skim the digressions if you must; the mercy at the center holds.
- 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 have to settle into its dense Renaissance Florence, but Romola rewards you with a woman growing beyond her sheltered life while Tito Melema’s charm curdles and Savonarola’s certainty presses in. It’s morally serious, richly observed, and best when you want a slow, thoughtful read.
- Stranger and more uneven than Alice, this one drifts between a Victorian love story and fairyland mid-sentence, the way dreams actually work. Bruno's baby-talk grates on some people, but the Gardener's nonsense songs are Carroll at his oddest.
- You follow Richard Lamb through Uruguay, where failed revolutions, gauchos, bandits, and bewildering hospitality turn his romantic confidence inside out. The book wanders like a long horseback conversation, funny and oddly tender, with landscapes that linger; its loose, episodic shape suits you if you enjoy travel more than plot.
- Through the Brazilian Wilderness non-fictionRoosevelt cataloguing birds and piranhas is pleasant enough, but the book turns quietly harrowing once the River of Doubt starts eating canoes and he's running a fever, still writing calmly. If you like old expedition accounts with real teeth, this earns its slow stretches.
- Voyage au Centre de la Terre Français