Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023)
29 books read for LibriVox
- Pure pulp, and it knows it: John Carter wakes on Mars leaping thirty feet in the low gravity, befriends a four-armed green warrior, and everything moves at a sprint. If you want depth, look elsewhere; if you want swords and airships, you're set.
- The logic puzzles hiding inside the nonsense are the real fun here, the Mad Tea-Party arguments actually hold together if you squint, and Alice herself is wonderfully stubborn about it all. Short enough to read in an afternoon, strange enough to stick with you longer.
- Roosevelt narrates his own life the way he lived it, at full gallop, from a sickly boy building himself up with boxing lessons to ranching in the Dakota Badlands to the White House. Fair warning, he moralizes constantly and skips the painful parts, but the energy is real.
- Nietzsche in full aphorism mode, which means half the book reads like a friend picking fights at 2am, funny and mean and weirdly quotable. You'll argue with him constantly, and that's the point; if you want a tidy argument laid out politely, this will drive you nuts.
- You have to enjoy slow, demanding arguments, but Kant gives moral life a bracing seriousness: the good will matters more than results, and freedom means giving yourself a law you can rationally stand behind. The sections on the moral law and the postulates reward patient rereading.
- The whole thing unfolds through diaries and letters, so you're piecing it together alongside the characters, and Jonathan Harker's early chapters in the castle still genuinely unnerve. It sags a bit in the middle, but Mina turns out to be the sharpest person in the book.
- You’ll enjoy William Brown’s stubborn, anarchic logic, especially when he and the Outlaws turn an ordinary afternoon into chaos while the adults completely misunderstand it. The stories are brisk, slyly funny, and affectionate without making William angelic, though the early-twentieth-century attitudes can occasionally show their age.
- 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.
- If you've ever hated an office job, watching Psmith serenely dismantle bank life (calling everyone Comrade, politely stalking his pompous manager Bickersdyke to his own club) is deeply satisfying. Early Wodehouse, so gentler than Jeeves, with a surprising amount of cricket, but the same silliness.
- Richard is unbearable while he's winning and mesmerizing once he starts to lose, talking himself into and out of kingship in some of the most musical verse Shakespeare wrote. It's all poetry and no sword fights, so come for the language or not at all.
- You’ll enjoy Sally herself, practical and good-hearted while her feckless brother Fillmore and a collection of theatrical schemers create financial and romantic chaos around her. It’s gentler and more sentimental than the Jeeves books, but the comic misunderstandings and Wodehouse dialogue still make it easy company.
- Almost nothing happens in it, and that's the whole gift: you board with Mrs. Todd, the herb-gathering landlady in a small Maine harbor town, and just visit people, her mother on Green Island, an old captain with strange stories. If you're patient, it feels like actual rest.
- 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.
- 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 watch Gatsby stare at that green light across the bay and slowly realize the whole glittering party is built on wanting one thing he can't have. It's short, sad, and gorgeous sentence by sentence, best read in a couple of quiet sittings.
- You can read it in an afternoon and laugh out loud the whole way; Algernon inventing a sickly friend named Bunbury to dodge dinner parties, Lady Bracknell interrogating a suitor about his handbag. Nothing serious happens, which is exactly the point, and the wordplay still lands.
- You get a real voice from 1789, wry and observant, telling you what the hold of a slave ship actually felt like to a kidnapped child, then years at sea saving coin by coin to buy himself free. The manumission scene alone earns the read.
- 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.
- It reads less like philosophy and more like a sharp coworker leveling with you about how power actually works, with Cesare Borgia as the case study. Short, blunt, weirdly funny in places.
- You get Dr Thorndyke at his most methodical, examining the peculiar red thumbmark through fingerprints, chemistry, and patient laboratory work rather than theatrical hunches. It’s an early, somewhat leisurely detective novel, but the careful forensic texture feels rewarding if you like seeing an investigation built piece by piece.
- Mary Lennox starts out genuinely unpleasant, sour and rude, and watching her thaw as she digs in the dirt with Dickon and his tame animals is what makes it work. Slow and gentle, more about weather and growing things than plot, and lovely for exactly that reason.
- 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 Count Fosco, a villain so charming you catch yourself liking him, and Marian Halcombe, who's braver than any of the men. It's long and Victorian, sure, but the moonlit road meeting hooks you early and the plotting stays sharp all the way through.
- You get Amory Blaine in all his charm, vanity, hunger, and confusion, stumbling through Princeton, romance, and the aftermath of war. The novel is uneven and sometimes wonderfully overstuffed, but its quick shifts in voice capture what it feels like to outgrow the person you thought you’d become.
- Stranger and sadder than Wonderland, in a good way: Alice crosses a chess board where Humpty Dumpty lectures her on what words mean and the White Knight keeps falling off his horse. If you like logic bent until it sings, this is where Jabberwocky lives.
- You get Viola’s clever, tender balancing act, Malvolio’s wonderfully sour self-importance, and a comedy that keeps slipping between farce and real loneliness. The mistaken identities can feel deliberately tangled, but the language is playful enough to reward reading aloud, especially when the characters are trying hardest to hide what they want.