Sonia
17 books read for LibriVox
- Once everyone escapes to the Forest of Arden, the play just relaxes, and you get Rosalind in disguise coaching her own lovestruck suitor in how to woo her. She runs the whole show, wittier than anyone around her, and the melancholy Jaques grumbling nearby only sweetens it.
- Read it for the night before Agincourt, when Hal walks disguised among his soldiers and gets argued with about whether his war is even just. The big speeches soar, sure, but the quiet doubts underneath are what stick, and the Chorus keeps apologizing that a stage can't hold it all.
- You’ll like these for their blunt, eerie storytelling, where a forest can feel genuinely dangerous and a talking animal may be wiser than the people around it. Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Ashenputtel still have a strange sharpness, though the violence and abrupt endings make this better for a taste of folklore than bedtime comfort.
- You get Shakespeare at his most verbally playful here, with four men making grand vows to avoid women and immediately tripping over their own love letters. The wit is dense and sometimes showy, but the women’s clear-eyed teasing gives the comedy real bite, and the late change in mood leaves it pleasantly unsettled.
- You read the letters of Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova and feel how poverty presses on affection, pride, and ordinary dignity. It’s tender and quietly painful, with Makar’s fussy self-consciousness making the intimacy feel remarkably human.
- 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 get a wonderfully fast, physical farce from the twin Antipholuses and twin Dromios, with everyone confidently mistaking the wrong man for someone they know. It’s deliberately slight and noisy, but the escalating confusion, especially around Adriana’s furious domestic arguments, makes Shakespeare feel surprisingly loose and playful.
- You get an unusually tender eighteenth-century comedy, where Bevil’s decency matters more than clever plotting and Tom and Phillis keep the earnestness from becoming airless. It’s slow and openly sentimental, but its concern with kindness, duty, and emotional restraint still feels surprisingly intimate.
- You get a filthy, sharply engineered Restoration comedy, with Horner’s fake impotence setting off Pinchwife’s paranoid jealousy and Margery’s blunt country innocence. The sexual politics are ugly in places, but the wordplay and social hypocrisy stay wonderfully alive if you enjoy comedy with teeth.
- You get a strange, musical world of singing contests, forged treasures, marriages, feuds, and spells, with Väinämöinen winning battles through knowledge as often as force. The episodes feel uneven and dreamlike, but the repeated charms and the bleak Kullervo story stay with you.
- You get Falstaff at his most shameless, trying to seduce two respectable wives and being cheerfully outwitted by both. The plotting is broad, quick, and pleasantly ridiculous, with disguises, pranks, and a final woodland humiliation, so you’ll enjoy it most when you want Shakespeare being openly comic rather than profound.
- If you think Gothic novels are all fainting and fog, this one goes places that still feel shocking: Ambrosio is Madrid's most revered preacher, and watching his vanity get worked open by the mysterious Matilda is genuinely unsettling. Lurid, cruel in spots, and weirdly fast-moving for 1796.
- You'll spend the whole play watching Paula fight for a fresh start she half-knows society won't allow her, and it stings because Pinero refuses to make her a villain or a saint. A short read, quietly brutal, better if you like drawing-room drama with teeth.
- The fun is watching Kate and Petruchio trade insults at full speed, two clever people who've finally met their match. Fair warning, the "taming" itself sits uneasily now, and Kate's last speech will either charm you or make you argue with the page.