Richard Kilmer (1942-2022)
12 books read for LibriVox
- You get a compact, surprisingly affecting story of Charlotte’s bad judgment, Montraville’s selfish charm, and Mademoiselle La Rue’s polished manipulation. The moralizing is heavy and the sentiment unapologetic, but its scenes of shame, loneliness, and social ruin still land if you’re patient with its eighteenth-century melodrama.
- Strange one, this: half of it is Willie chasing his lost girl with a revolver through a filthy industrial England, all jealousy and coal smoke, then a comet's green haze makes everyone wake up sane. If utopias bore you, skip it, but that furious first half really stings.
- You get a sprawling, rough-edged Australian adventure narrated by Dick Marston, whose loyalty to his reckless brother keeps pulling him back toward bushranging. Captain Starlight brings swagger and danger, but the book’s real strength is Dick’s uneasy honesty about the damage their freedom leaves behind.
- Pure 1950s rocket-jockey stuff, and it knows it: cadet Tom stuck in a unit with Roger, who needles everyone, and Astro, a big Venusian who'd rather hug an engine than talk. The Mars crash-and-trek back half is genuinely tense.
- You’re here for Jules Verne’s fascination with machinery, mines, and whole communities hidden underground, with engineer James Starr and the mysterious Nell giving the adventure some human warmth. The suspense is old-fashioned and occasionally creaky, but the coal-lit setting stays wonderfully strange.
- Frank Cowperwood watching a lobster slowly devour a squid as a boy tells you everything about how he'll run Philadelphia's money later. Dreiser writes flat and detailed, almost like a ledger, but if cold ambition fascinates you more than likable heroes, this gets under your skin.
- Burroughs leaves the jungle for the thirteenth century: a stolen prince, raised to hate his own royal blood, becomes England's most feared outlaw. Sword fights arrive on schedule and you'll guess the secret early, which somehow doesn't spoil it.
- You’ll appreciate how Du Bois turns a cotton-growing story into an argument about land, labor, and Black self-determination, without losing sight of Zora and Bles Alwyn as complicated people. The romance can feel schematic, but the novel’s anger, social vision, and sharp look at exploitation still give it real weight.
- You get Dr Thorndyke at his most methodical, examining the peculiar red thumbmark through fingerprints, chemistry, and patient laboratory work rather than theatrical hunches. It’s an early, somewhat leisurely detective novel, but the careful forensic texture feels rewarding if you like seeing an investigation built piece by piece.
- You feel the Berry family’s displacement in every cramped room and dangerous New York street, while Dunbar’s anger at racist power stays close to the surface. It’s melodramatic and sometimes blunt, but Hester’s fear and Joe’s reckless hunger for freedom give the novel real emotional weight.
- You get a fascinating, unsentimental look at Frank Cowperwood building power in Chicago, where streetcars, money, and social standing matter as much as affection. It’s deliberate and often morally chilly, but Dreiser makes Cowperwood’s appetite for possession and control oddly compelling, especially as it strains his relationships.