Hey Lemmy, what are some good public domain books?
I tend to like the volunteer-read audiobooks on librivox and recently was curious about their Sherlock Holmes books (never read or listened to before), but I’m wondering what else is out there and popular in the community.
If epic English poetry doesn’t scare you, Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene is great. It’s like Arthurian legend on acid. Check out the version with the Walter Crane illustrations, which are also excellent.
I’ve actually been a big fan of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a long time so thank you for bringing it up and indulging me in a happy nostalgia. I’ve heard it described variously over the years as possibly the first or at least early science fiction, as well as even proto-feminist in its more subtle themes. Might be a good time to return to it. There are some potentially Luddite themes as well but in an era when people were en masse encountering rapid technological advancement while philosophical approaches to that rapid advancement were still in their infancy it’s a forgivable flaw.
If ebooks are acceptable to you, then Standard Ebooks is the shit. Proper classics, formatted in a nice way, ready to drop onto whatever reading device you have.
“We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin is the book that inspired both “Brave New World” and “1984”. If you go looking for it in paper form it’s sometimes credited to Eugene Zamyatin, as Eugene is the English version of Yevgeny.
I tried to read that but it was way too drawn out. I think I made it to page 200 or so and he didnt even leave his village yet. And it has 1000 pages. That was years ago so numbers might be wrong.
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