What are the best public domain books that you’ve read? My currently downloaded books include “The Time Machine”, “Pride and Prejudice”, “Frankenstein”, “War and Peace”, “On Liberty”, “Metamorphosis” (all from Librivox), etc. I especially like “Crime and Punishment” and “Brothers Karamazov” and others by Dostoevsky since they delve deeper into human psychology, values, and morality. Also to add, Librivox is so fucking cool and now I have something to listen to on my daily bus/car rides.
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I started consciously trying to read more old books in the last year or two and I’ve discovered that I love adventure stories! Jules Verne, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels… Winston Churchill’s “My Early Life” is nonfiction that might as well be an adventure story, haha.
For humour it’s hard to go wrong with P G Wodehouse; he wrote much more than just the Jeeves stories.
Recently I read through all of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s collected short stories (the author of Anne of Green Gables among many others).
Dracula was a great read and genuinely spooky, ditto Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.
Sometimes I go to Project Gutenberg, hit “random” and download anything that catches my eye :)
Not a book suggestion, but I cannot recommend Standard Ebooks highly enough as a source of public domain ebooks. Professionally typeset, with consistent standards, all while being free and volunteer-driven!
Thank you for the link. I didn’t know about Standard Ebooks: looks like a very broad range of material!
Do you happen to know if they have any in other languages than English?
Unfortunately, they don’t accept non-English books… but they do provide all the tools and guidelines they use for their books, so if someone wanted to make & release non-English books elsewhere I don’t imagine there’d be problems.
Saving this for later. I love project Gutenberg, but the quality is kinda all over the place.
Frankenstein, Count of Monte Cristo, HPL
Great stuff
I recently finished The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It’s a good start if you want to get into Agatha Christie novels.
My fiancée absolutely loves the Count of Monte Cristo. I have not yet read it.
I like Lovecraft’s stories.
It’s great, but the translation in public domain is not as good as the one by Robin Buss in recent years. I think some translations even ignore large parts of the book, e.g. the opium-smoking harem part. That’s the general issue with translated foreign language books from the 1800s/early 1900s.
I’d recommend reading Orwell’s earlier works (which might or might not be public domain in the US, but is in Canada, Australia and parts of the EU). Like “Down and Out in Paris and London”. Nothing at all like 1984 or Animal Farm, but still really good.
Dostoevsky is amazing. I’m not sure I could have followed his writing over audiobook, though. Tolstoy is an obvious add if you like Russian lit.
I haven’t read any of it in a while, but I loved anything by Jules Verne when I was a kid. Frankenstein is arguably one of the first science fiction books, but Verne really made it a genre.
Not to be too much of a “the book is better than the movie”-person, but Les Miserables is really good and has a lot deeper meaning than the play or movie based on the play. The Count of Monte Cristo is also worth a read.
You’re absolutely right – I actually read those in my mother tongue. I’m probably gonna read some of Leo Tolstoy next. Thanks for the recommendations!
War and Peace was written primarily in Russian, but a lot of the dialog was written in French since much of the aristocracy at the time in Russia spoke French. I read a version that translated the Russian to English, but left the French as is, which was strange.
That’s just something you might need to keep in mind when figuring out which version to read.
Frankenstein really is a fantastic read. Anything by Ray Bradbury, I read the short story “The Pedestrian” in school and it had a strong impression on me.
“Starting forth” the best book to learn about forth or programming in general
Ive had a good time with anything by Mark Twain. His satire and comedy is great. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/53 Try not to get the amazon re-releases. They removed a lot of the language of the time, which (in my opinion) changes the books meaning slightly.
Sherlock Holmes is public domain now.
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18137
+2 more not in public domain yet. :(
John Scalzi does a DRM free addition to the series too!
The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Most people are aware of her children’s books like A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, but she wrote dozens of other books and short stories for adults. The Shuttle is probably one of my absolute favorite books, and I re-read at least once a year.
I’d like to add Dracula by Bram Stoker and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol to the books already mentioned.
I’m throwing in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which I really enjoyed, and The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin, which is a really interesting travel journal. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne is also great. And since you like Dostoevsky, maybe try Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev?
People always praise Frankenstein, but I thought it was poorly written and frankly nonsensical. Shelley’s The Last Man is better, but a bit dull.
