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.
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.