rookieblue
3 books read for LibriVox
- You get a wonderfully playable comedy here, with Tony Lumpkin stirring up trouble and Kate Hardcastle disguising herself as a barmaid to find out what Marlow is really like. The plotting is deliberately tangled and theatrical, but the dialogue stays bright, mischievous, and surprisingly sharp about shyness and social performance.
- 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.
- 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.