Thomas A. Copeland
11 books read for LibriVox
- Pirates kidnap a family of children and the children turn out to be the unnerving ones, especially Emily, whom Hughes watches with this cool, amused detachment that makes you laugh and then feel guilty. If you like your books strange and quietly ruthless, this delivers.
- You enjoy Shaw’s strange, argumentative side here: five plays that imagine humanity evolving toward lives lasting centuries, with a Serpent who makes more sense than Adam and a future society ruled by long-lived thinkers. It’s talky and uneven, but its impatience with human shortsightedness keeps sparking.
- You’ll enjoy its wild, comic sprawl if you can forgive it wandering: Orlando loses his wits over Angelica, knights charge through enchanted forests, and Ariosto keeps interrupting himself with sly asides. It feels less like a straight adventure than a brilliantly unruly storyteller refusing to stay on one road.
- Satan gets all the best lines, and watching him talk himself into ruin is half the pull; the verse is dense and takes a slow ear, but once the rhythm clicks it carries you. Read it aloud when you can, even a page at a time.
- Paine argues with the Bible the way he argued with kings, blunt and funny and completely unafraid, part of it written while he was expecting arrest in revolutionary France. If you like watching someone reason out loud with total conviction, this crackles; if religious polemic wears on you, skip it.
- Fair warning, it's a hall of mirrors: Édouard is a novelist writing a novel called The Counterfeiters while Gide watches him do it. But if you like books that think out loud, the tangle of Bernard, Olivier, and all those slippery adults is quietly gripping stuff.
- You’ll like this for its strange, moonlit beauty and its sadness about wanting two worlds at once. Alveric’s journey into Elfland, where time barely behaves and Lirazel cannot quite belong to the human world, feels more like an old ballad than a modern fantasy novel.
- You get a wonderfully odd blend of deep-sea adventure and speculative science, with Professor Maracot, Cyrus Headley, and Bill Scanlan trapped far below the Atlantic among the remnants of a lost civilization. It’s brisk, earnest, and occasionally very Victorian in its ideas, but the strange underwater setting gives it a charm that lingers.
- You get a dark, beautifully skewed adventure where the charming James Durrie keeps slipping beyond everyone’s grasp, while his moral, tormented brother Henry tries to live with the wreckage. The shifting narrators and haunted atmosphere make it stranger and more psychologically sharp than a straightforward swashbuckler.
- You get a brisk, pulpy Barsoom adventure with Carthoris and Thuvia caught in political trouble, strange cities, and aerial escapes. Thuvia’s uncanny power to summon banths gives the romance some teeth, though the episodic plot feels more like a lively continuation than a deeply developed novel.
- A stranger's body turns up in a bathtub wearing nothing but a pince-nez, and Lord Peter Wimsey investigates mostly because it amuses him. The banter is the point here, though Sayers gives him real shell shock underneath, which keeps the froth from floating away entirely.