Ted Delorme
5 books read for LibriVox
- You can read it in an afternoon, and it moves like a prank: earthquakes, shipwrecks, absurd disasters, all while Pangloss insists this is the best of all possible worlds. If bleak comedy makes you laugh out loud, this is a very good afternoon.
- Ayesha is the reason to go: a two-thousand-year-old queen who talks philosophy while casually terrifying everyone, and she gets stranger the closer you look. The Victorian adventure trappings creak a bit (and the colonial attitudes with them), but the ending in the caves genuinely unsettles.
- Leacock pokes fun at the small-town Mariposans so gently you end up loving them, and the chapter where the steamer Mariposa Belle sinks in about six feet of water is genuinely funny. Fair warning, nothing much happens here, which is exactly the point.
- You watch the sharp young Isidore Beautrelet chase Lupin through French history, clues, and the cliffs of Étretat. It’s an old-fashioned, melodramatic puzzle, but the pleasure is real: Lupin’s charm keeps colliding with Beautrelet’s stubborn intelligence, and every answer opens another door.
- 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.