Lars Rolander (1942-2016)
20 books read for LibriVox
- An hour's read that leaves a bruise: a young woman buries her brother knowing it will kill her, and Creon digs in until it costs him everything. If you like arguments where both sides have a point and neither will bend, this is the one.
- These two aren't young lovers, they're middle-aged, vain, magnificent messes who keep wrecking empires over each other, and you half want to shake them. Stay for Enobarbus, the dry-eyed friend whose barge speech about Cleopatra is worth the whole play.
- 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.
- Fair warning, it's a slow, strange ride, knights jousting on repeat in old prose that takes some settling into. But if you let it work on you, Lancelot's divided heart and the whole doomed slide toward Camlann land with a sadness modern retellings rarely earn.
- Sophocles wrote this near ninety, and it shows in the best way: a blind, exhausted Oedipus finally finding a place that will take him, with Antigone at his elbow. Slower and stranger than Oedipus Rex, but the ending has a quiet awe that stays with you.
- Iago talks to you directly, and the awful thing is you almost enjoy his company while he wrecks a good man's life over a handkerchief and some careful hints. It's painful in the way only watching preventable disaster is, so save it for when you can take that.
- These are stories where miracles happen in kitchens and farmyards, Värmland legends and Christ legends told with a straight face and a warm heart, like the marsh croft girl whose stubborn honesty upends a courtroom. If quiet, folk-tale strangeness suits you better than irony, she'll hold up.
- You spend time with the tender, maddening Ranevskaya and the newly wealthy Lopakhin, as everyone talks around the fate of the estate and avoids the decisions that might save it. It’s quietly funny and deeply sad, with the strange feeling of hearing laughter in a house already beginning to empty.
- You get a dark, ferociously theatrical tragedy where the Duchess’s private marriage collides with her brothers’ vicious control, and Bosola watches it all with a bitter, uneasy intelligence. The plot turns brutal, but Webster’s language and the play’s strange flashes of tenderness keep it from becoming mere gloom.
- Two squabbling kids inherit a ruined castle and a grumpy white mole who only works magic when they manage not to quarrel, which is harder than it sounds. Nesbit's time-hopping treasure hunt is funny and a bit melancholy underneath, and the bickering feels true in a way most children's books dodge.
- You get a viciously funny, morally rotten theatrical ride through Barabas’s schemes, where everyone’s greed and hypocrisy keep feeding his ingenuity. The play is bluntly antisemitic in places, so it needs some historical distance, but its black comedy and gleeful distrust of piety still feel startlingly alive.
- A locked room, a woman attacked inside it, and no way anyone got in or out. Rouletabille, the teenage reporter who cracks it, is cocky in a way that grows on you, and the solution actually plays fair.
- You get Gösta, a defrocked drunken priest who keeps wrecking and redeeming himself, plus a whole manor of pensioned cavaliers running riot on Ekeby for a year. It reads like Värmland folklore told by firelight, episodic and feverish, so skip it if you need a tidy plot.
- You get why people still quote it once Mephistopheles calmly admits he's in hell right now, standing there. The middle sags into slapstick with popes and horse traders, honestly, but Faustus watching his last hour tick away is worth the whole slim thing.
- You get a darkly funny, claustrophobic family drama where Gregers Werle’s hunger for absolute truth collides with Hjalmar Ekdal’s comforting self-deceptions. The wild duck in the attic feels oddly central, and the play keeps asking whether honesty heals people or simply gives suffering a cleaner name.
- You need patience for James’s long, winding sentences, but they reward you with astonishing access to Kate Croy’s calculations, Merton Densher’s evasions, and Milly Theale’s vulnerable generosity. The pleasure lies in watching love, money, and conscience blur until you’re unsure whom to pity.
- Nils starts out mean, honestly, a boy who torments the farm animals, and watching him earn the trust of Akka and the wild geese as they fly the length of Sweden is quietly moving. It's episodic and folkloric, better savored a chapter a night than rushed.
- You’ll appreciate its strange, abrasive energy: Timon’s lavish generosity curdles into furious contempt, while Apemantus needles him with the honesty nobody else will risk. It’s a jagged, unfinished-feeling play, but if you like Shakespeare when he’s bitter, funny, and morally unruly, it stays with you.
- You get Shakespeare at his most sour and slippery here: Troilus and Cressida’s love story keeps colliding with Pandarus’s bawdy meddling, while Ulysses and Hector make the Trojan War feel tawdry rather than heroic. It’s strange, funny, and deliberately hard to settle into, but richly rewarding.