Larry Wilson
12 books read for LibriVox
- Joyce's one play, and it's all talk, three people circling the question of whether love can survive total freedom, with Richard almost daring his partner Bertha toward another man. Slow and cerebral in the Ibsen mold, but if you like watching jealousy dissected honestly, it stings.
- Shaw having fun with his own critics: a young woman's play gets staged anonymously, then actual reviewers bicker over who wrote it. Inside, two respectable kids come home from jail refusing to feel ashamed, and their parents' panic is funnier than it has any right to be.
- Johnson moves between Lift Every Voice and Sing and the sermon-poems of God's Trombones, where The Creation turns a Black preacher's cadence into verse. Formal skill and pulpit fire at once; the spoken power survives on the page.
- Poe's poems are best read aloud at night, when the hypnotic drumbeat of The Raven and the sad chime of Annabel Lee can really work on you. It's a small body of work, moody and musical, and if gothic melancholy isn't your thing, skip it.
- Fair warning, this is decadent verse cranked all the way up: skulls, worms, and a poet so bored with the universe he sneers at his own book. If you have a soft spot for Baudelaire-drunk gloom that occasionally tips into camp, it's a strange, morbid little pleasure.
- You get an unusually tender eighteenth-century comedy, where Bevil’s decency matters more than clever plotting and Tom and Phillis keep the earnestness from becoming airless. It’s slow and openly sentimental, but its concern with kindness, duty, and emotional restraint still feels surprisingly intimate.
- You get the strange, tender version of Peter Pan here, before he belongs to the stage: Peter plays among the fairies in Kensington Gardens while Barrie’s lonely narrator imagines a bond with a little boy named David. It’s episodic and sometimes overly sentimental, but its sadness has real bite.
- Scottish second sight, a family doom announced by a phantom horse's clanking shoe, a tutor and a sleepwalking woman drawn together. Minor MacDonald but potent, a long ghost story more eerie than gothic; one sitting, after dark.
- 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.
- You get sharp, brittle dialogue and a surprisingly bruised family drama, with Nicky’s drug use exposing the rot beneath his mother Florence’s glamorous social life. It’s melodramatic and a little dated, but Coward’s cruelty and comic timing make the emotional collisions land.