Lynne T
15 books read for LibriVox
- These are trickster tales with teeth, jackals outwitting tigers, a lamb rolling home inside a drum singing to the wolves who want to eat him. Best in small doses before bed, and Jacobs' endnotes tracing where each story wandered from are half the fun if you like that sort of rabbit hole.
- If you liked the Scarlet Pimpernel, this one takes you to Nantes during the Terror, where Carrier's drownings make the stakes genuinely grim, and Percy stays offstage longer than you'd want. The revenge plot against Yvonne is pure melodrama, but it's melodrama done with real conviction.
- Collins is angry in this one, at marriage laws that could trap a woman on a technicality, and at brawny athlete-worship, and the anger drives it. Anne Silvester's plight genuinely tightens your chest, though you'll have to forgive him a few sermons along the way.
- If you like your Gilded Age fiction cold-blooded, this delivers: a rich, unreadable husband, his young wife Maida, an old lover, and revenge served with terrifying politeness. Saltus writes in glittering little epigrams, and the ending is genuinely chilling, so don't expect comfort.
- Babbage is cranky, brilliant, and completely unable to stay on topic, so you get the Analytical Engine one chapter and a war on London's organ grinders the next. If you enjoy an eccentric Victorian mind wandering wherever it pleases, this is good company; skip it if you want tidy memoir.
- You get a funny, melancholy book about growing up, with Wendy trying to make sense of Peter’s charm, selfishness, and alarming refusal to remember. Barrie’s Neverland is playful but strangely sad, especially when its games brush against loneliness, time, and the cost of staying young.
- Phoebe is the fun here: clever, unsentimental, fully aware her grandfather sells butter and her suitor is a dull rich boy she could run like a business, and Oliphant lets her be right. Quiet, wry Victorian social comedy, so skip it if you need big drama.
- You watch Rilla Blythe grow from a frivolous sixteen-year-old into someone steadied by wartime loss, while Susan’s care of the abandoned baby Jims brings warmth and grit. It’s more somber than the earlier Anne books, but its letters, small acts of courage, and unsentimental tenderness stay with you.
- Churchill's one novel, written in his twenties, and yes, the hero is basically Churchill with better hair, leading a revolution in a made-up Mediterranean republic. The politics are stagey, but the speeches crackle, and watching the young man rehearse his future self is oddly fascinating.
- You get Tarzan at his most grief-driven here: after finding his estate destroyed and Jane apparently dead, he turns vengeance loose across wartime Africa. The action is brisk and vividly pulpy, though the racist wartime caricatures and colonial assumptions can make this a difficult read.
- You follow Andrzej Kmicic, a reckless, compromised nobleman whose swagger keeps colliding with his better instincts, through war, loyalty, and political chaos. It’s long, melodramatic, and proudly Polish, but the battles, reversals, and sheer force of Kmicic’s personality reward you if you settle into its pace.
- 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.
- A young journalist finds a dead man in a London lane at 2 a.m. and just refuses to let go, and following Spargo's digging (old court records, a scrap of paper, a decades-buried fraud) is quietly satisfying. Come to it for the puzzle, not deep characters.
- You get a bizarre, feverish last-man-on-earth story in Adam Jeffson, whose Arctic expedition leaves him wandering through emptied cities, burning with awe, disgust, and loneliness. Shiel’s ornate prose can feel excessive, but if you enjoy decadent strangeness, the book’s solitude gets under your skin.
- Woolf before the fireworks, so it moves at a Victorian pace, but watching Rachel Vinrace wake up to music, to people, to Terence, on that slow boat and in the hotel gossip after, is quietly moving. Read it patient and a little tender, and know it doesn't end gently.