ToddHW
38 books read for LibriVox
- You get a fiercely strange tragedy about pride, hunger, and the impossibility of speaking to people you despise. Coriolanus is magnificent and maddening, while Volumnia’s hard, hungry love gives the play its deepest ache; the Roman politics can feel blunt, but the language cuts.
- Marlowe writes a king who wrecks his kingdom for love of Gaveston and somehow makes you pity him more as he loses everything. It's bleak, cruel in places, and the deposition scenes cut deep.
- Shaw having fun with his own critics: a young woman's play gets staged anonymously, then actual reviewers bicker over who wrote it. Inside, two respectable kids come home from jail refusing to feel ashamed, and their parents' panic is funnier than it has any right to be.
- A Hamilton play a century before the musical: George Arliss's stage vehicle about the funding fight and the Reynolds blackmail, built for strong curtain lines. Creaky in places, brisk in most, and fascinating as what 1917 wanted its founders to be.
- You get a wonderfully sharp weekend of theatrical selfishness as the Bliss family invites guests, then promptly ignores them for their own dramas. The play is knowingly artificial and very funny, though its elegant, brittle chatter may leave you cold if you need sympathetic characters.
- Mostly it's clever people lounging in a house shaped like a ship, talking circles around each other while old Captain Shotover mutters prophecies from the corner, and somehow that's the fun. If you like Shaw's talk more than plot, this is him at his strangest, with a jolt at the end.
- If you liked the Scarlet Pimpernel, this one takes you to Nantes during the Terror, where Carrier's drownings make the stakes genuinely grim, and Percy stays offstage longer than you'd want. The revenge plot against Yvonne is pure melodrama, but it's melodrama done with real conviction.
- You get a sharp, funny argument about whether moral goodness can survive without money, as Major Barbara wrestles with her arms-dealing father, Andrew Undershaft. Shaw gives you brilliant talk rather than much action, and the play keeps unsettling your sympathies long after the jokes land.
- Collins is angry in this one, at marriage laws that could trap a woman on a technicality, and at brawny athlete-worship, and the anger drives it. Anne Silvester's plight genuinely tightens your chest, though you'll have to forgive him a few sermons along the way.
- Honestly, you'd read this more for the history than the laughs, but Asa Trenchard, the blunt Vermont Yankee loose among his fussy English relatives, still lands a few. If you like creaky Victorian farce and Lord Dundreary's mangled proverbs, it's a quick, odd curiosity.
- You get a funny, melancholy book about growing up, with Wendy trying to make sense of Peter’s charm, selfishness, and alarming refusal to remember. Barrie’s Neverland is playful but strangely sad, especially when its games brush against loneliness, time, and the cost of staying young.
- 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 Gogol at his strangest and sharpest here: a nose walking around St. Petersburg, a petty clerk swallowed by his overcoat, and a diary quietly coming apart. The comedy is wonderfully deadpan, but the loneliness underneath keeps it from feeling weightless.
- You get a wonderfully unsettling theatre rehearsal where six unfinished characters interrupt the actors and insist their suffering is more real than performance. It’s funny, argumentative, and deliberately slippery, especially if you enjoy questions about identity and art more than tidy emotional resolution.
- You'll spend most of it wanting to shake Orgon, who's so besotted with his pious houseguest that he ignores everyone, including his sharp-tongued maid Dorine, who steals every scene she's in. It's fast, mean, very funny, and reads in an evening.
- Three con artists set up shop in a plague-emptied London house and fleece everyone who knocks, and watching Face and Subtle improvise faster and faster as the marks pile up is genuinely funny. The Jacobean language takes some chewing, but the scheming underneath is pure farce.
- 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 methodical early police procedural, with Inspector French tracing a human body packed into a cask through shipping records, witnesses, and shifting alibis. It takes its time and occasionally feels procedural in the old-fashioned sense, but the patient reconstruction is quietly satisfying.
- 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.
- Fair warning, Morris writes in deliberately old-fashioned prose that keeps breaking into verse, so it asks patience. But Thiodolf's choice, between a charmed hauberk that saves his life and the good of his folk, has real weight, and you can feel Tolkien taking notes.
- A vain little nobody blows into a corrupt town, gets mistaken for a government inspector, and just rolls with it, borrowing money from every trembling official in sight. You'll read it in an evening, laugh at Khlestakov's shameless lying, then notice the satire still lands on people you know.
- If you liked the Scarlet Pimpernel, this is Orczy imagining his ancestor: Diogenes, a broke soldier of fortune in frozen 1620s Holland who takes a shady job abducting a girl and can't stop grinning about it. Pure swagger and snow, happily unserious, slow in patches.
- Michael Lanyard is a Paris jewel thief who decides, mid-career, that he'd rather be a person, and a criminal syndicate called the Pack won't let him. Pure 1914 pulp, secret doors and rooftop chases included, and it moves fast if you don't mind some creaky melodrama.
- Gossip as blood sport, and Sheridan makes every barb land. The screen scene, where Lady Teazle's hiding spot collapses in front of everyone, is still genuinely funny after 250 years.
- 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.
- You get a wonderfully companionable mix of travel sketches, ghostly tales, and gentle satire, with Geoffrey Crayon wandering through English inns and Christmas customs before giving you Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane. It moves leisurely, but the wit and homesick warmth make it easy to settle into.
- You get an unusual, slightly lopsided Shakespeare play here, with Palamon and Arcite’s fierce friendship turning into rivalry over Emilia, while the Jailer's Daughter brings a surprisingly tender, earthy counterpoint. The verse shifts between Shakespearean weight and Fletcher’s brisker comedy, so its strangeness is part of the appeal.
- Four golfers find a body under a viaduct and detect it half to death, each theory more ingenious and more wrong. Knox is gently mocking the detective story from inside it; funniest if you already love the genre's rules.
- You settle in for a long, melancholy farewell to Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan, now older and pulled apart by politics, loyalty, and ambition. It moves more slowly than the earlier musketeer novels, but its sense of friendship aging into legend has real weight.
- You get sharp, brittle dialogue and a surprisingly bruised family drama, with Nicky’s drug use exposing the rot beneath his mother Florence’s glamorous social life. It’s melodramatic and a little dated, but Coward’s cruelty and comic timing make the emotional collisions land.
- 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.
- You’d enjoy this for its wonderfully strange Pacific-island premise, where explorers uncover ancient beings preserved in a temple and get drawn into their old feud. It’s slower and more earnest than Haggard’s adventure novels, but the mix of lost-world romance, prophecy, and uneasy reflections on civilization has a peculiar, dreamlike pull.
- 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.
- Shaw in a genuinely sunny mood, which is rarer than you'd think. A broke dentist falls hard for a woman raised to be immune to romance, her chaotic twin siblings cause havoc, and a hotel waiter named William quietly out-wises everyone.