1mo ago

What are the best public domain books you've read?

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.

27 comments

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!
- Saving this for later. I love project Gutenberg, but the quality is kinda all over the place.
- 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.

I recently finished The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's a good start if you want to get into Agatha Christie novels.

Frankenstein, Count of Monte Cristo, HPL
- Great stuff

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :)

I absolutely adore Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
As an aside, I tried so hard to read Crime and Punishment(twice), but I don't think I ever finished it. Or if I did I can't remember the ending. Maybe I had a bad translation, or maybe I have a short attention span, I don't know...
(Sorry for the edit, I hit send before I was done typing)
- As I mentioned in another comment, the translations in public domain are often not as good as modern ones. They might shy away from certain things/censor stuff (or in the case of The Count of Monte Cristo, just completely ignore large parts of the book), and either way they use more archaic language that usually doesn't flow as smoothly. Of course there are exceptions to this, but this is my general impression. Though, to be honest, I didn't like Crime and Punishment that much either haha. I didn't understand why people saw it as one of the greatest books ever written.

I'd like to add Dracula by Bram Stoker and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol to the books already mentioned.

For Dutch an important source of public domain literature is the Database voor de Nederlandse letteren (dbnl), in cooperation of the Nederlandse taalunie (Dutch Language Union) with several heritage libraries and the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library).
My favourite book you can find on there is probably De stille kracht (The silent force) by Louis Couperus. It's about a high ranking Dutch colonial family living in a town in East Java, and also the people around them, trying to get the Indies to follow their rules, to be what they want it to be, but in the end failing miserably.
There's always a lingering feeling of impending doom which, though it goes more to the background at times, never fully goes away. I love it.
De stille kracht is well-known as far as Dutch novels go, there are translations in major European languages (even one in Finnish!).

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.

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