Michele Fry
6 books read for LibriVox
- Forget the scandal, it's really about Connie coming back to life in that gamekeeper's hut while Clifford talks coal profits up at the house. Lawrence preaches a bit, he can't help it, but the tenderness is real and it lands if you let it.
- You get Mary Shelley’s darker, stranger side here, especially in “The Mortal Immortal,” where an alchemist’s mistake turns a love story into a meditation on outliving everyone you know. The stories can feel uneven and theatrically gothic, but their loneliness, moral unease, and fascination with bodies that refuse to behave stay with you.
- A magician in old Spain holds a charwoman's shadow, and his apprentice sets out to win it back for her. Dunsany writes sentences like slow gold, and this fairy tale for adults earns its ending honestly.
- You get leprechauns, the god Pan, and a Philosopher who lectures his wife on everything from washing to wisdom, all told in prose that keeps wandering off into odd little sermons. If you like your whimsy with actual ideas underneath, this Irish oddity is lovely company.
- Buck never even gives the mother a name, and somehow that makes her more real, not less: a peasant woman whose husband walks off one day, and who keeps his memory alive with faked letters. Quiet, sad, patient reading, best when you're in the mood to sit with someone's whole life.
- You get Paine at his clearest here, arguing against Burke that government exists for living people, not inherited privilege, and even sketching public relief for the poor. The pamphlet is blunt, argumentative, and tied to the politics of its moment, but its insistence on ordinary people’s rights still feels bracing.