Nadine Eckert-Boulet
14 books read for LibriVox
- If you liked Lady Audley's Secret, this is Braddon in a warmer mood: Aurora is impulsive and flawed (she horsewhips a stablehand in one startling scene) but you end up rooting for her anyway. It's melodrama with blackmail and a murder, so come ready for that.
- Lesser-known Verne, but fun: a half-mad inventor with a doomsday weapon gets kidnapped to a pirate's hideout inside a hollow island, and you watch it all through his keeper's secret diary. Pulpy and a bit stiff in places, though the villain's lair alone earns its keep.
- Yes, it's huge, and Hugo will stop everything for fifty pages on the Paris sewers, but Jean Valjean lifting that cart, or the bishop handing over his candlesticks, will sit in your chest for years. Skim the digressions if you must; the mercy at the center holds.
- You’d enjoy this if you like romantic novels that keep questioning romance: Modeste’s letters to the poet Canalis are tender, clever, and tangled up with literary vanity, while her father’s ruined fortunes add real pressure. It’s talky and socially observant, with Balzac gently exposing how people perform love before they understand it.
- If you want to see detective fiction before Sherlock Holmes existed, here's Lecoq crawling around a snowy murder scene reading footprints, matching wits with a prisoner who won't crack. Fair warning: halfway through it swerves into a long family backstory, so patience helps.
- Magdalen Vanstone loses her whole inheritance on a legal technicality and decides to scheme it back, disguises and sham marriage included, and you spend the whole book rooting for someone doing genuinely dubious things. Captain Wragge, her con-artist accomplice, nearly steals it.
- 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.
- Richard talks straight to you from the first speech, so you end up half rooting for a murderer and enjoying it, especially when he woos Anne over her father-in-law's coffin. If you like villains who make you complicit, this moves fast and never apologizes.
- 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 settle in for a long, melancholy farewell to Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan, now older and pulled apart by politics, loyalty, and ambition. It moves more slowly than the earlier musketeer novels, but its sense of friendship aging into legend has real weight.
- You go for the sinister hypnotist Svengali, but what stays with you is bohemian Paris, three British art students, and tone-deaf Trilby herself, warm and doomed. Fair warning, du Maurier rambles and the Svengali caricature is ugly by any modern measure, so read it with eyes open.
- 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.
- You’re glad you read it for the strange intimacy of spending a day inside Leopold Bloom’s mind, where errands, advertisements, hunger, and memory keep turning unexpectedly funny and tender. It’s demanding and occasionally maddening, but the jokes, wordplay, and Molly Bloom’s closing monologue reward patience.