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What are the best public domain books you've read? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by anonvurr@lemmy.zip to c/books@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] KanadrAllegria@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

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.