Rita Boutros
7 books read for LibriVox
- Early Wodehouse, before Jeeves, so you get a cheerful school story where a prefect's uncle turns up as a pupil younger than he is, plus a lot of cricket. Gentle fun if you like that world; if cricket bores you, this will test your patience.
- You get Machiavelli thinking through how republics preserve liberty, using Rome’s tribunes, public conflict, and political institutions as his working examples. It’s dense and sometimes repetitive rather than easy reading, but rewarding if you enjoy watching a sharp, unsentimental mind test political ideals against history.
- Eugene Gant grows up in a boarding house full of strangers, torn between a stonecutter father who rages like weather and a mother who counts every penny. Wolfe's sentences pour out in floods, so if you like language that overreaches on purpose, this one aches beautifully.
- You get absurd political satire, shameless wordplay, and the wonderfully slippery Peisetairus, who talks a flock of birds into imagining a new city in the sky. It’s bawdy, strange, and occasionally more interested in a joke than a tidy plot, but the chorus and wild premise make it unusually vivid on the page.
- You read it for the eerie, brooding portrait of Petrograd during the First World War, where the city feels almost like a living, secret presence. It takes patience, since Walpole lingers over atmosphere more than action, but the unease gradually gets under your skin.
- Jack was a real burglar and hobo, and he tells it flat and unrepentant, hopping freights, cracking safes, sitting in Salt Chunk Mary's kitchen over beans and coffee. If you like your outlaws matter-of-fact instead of romantic, this is oddly good company, and it convinced Burroughs too.