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.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ has pretty much all of them
I definitely recommend Dracula — not only is it good, but it’s also the prototype for basically every subsequent vampire book/movie:
Frankenstein. If you’ve never read it, the caricature of what it is has done it no justice. It is an incredible book.
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.
I notice that you specifically mentioned audiobooks, but if you’re interested in written ebooks, check out Standard EBooks
They take public domain books and run them through a detailed process of editing and typesetting them to create beautiful versions.
Personally, I’m a big fan of The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain. There is an audiobook version on Librevox too!
don quixote is great, i reread it recently and had a great time
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.
life hack: read the children version of the book to save time
the don quixote i have from when i read it in school is 170 pages long
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.
Tha card by Arnold Bennet https://librivox.org/the-card-by-arnold-bennett/
The count of Monte cristo by Alexander Dumas: https://librivox.org/the-count-of-monte-cristo-by-alexandre-dumas/
I just finished count of monte cristo! I’ve never read a more epic and fulfilling revenge story. It was entertaining the whole way through.
Treasure Island should be public domain. After reading it, watch Blacks Sails (TV show which plays before the book). Both are quite good. Also books by Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).
Edit: Just found out that there are two cool looking movies of “Around the World in Eighty Days”.
I loved treasure island growing up. Black sails is supposed to be kinda dark tho right? Treasure island was a fun adventure book.
Yes treasure island is a book for teenagers i think, but black sails is clearly for adults. With prostitution, violence etc.
Marx’s works!
I’ve read the manifesto and parts of Capital 1. Capital is interesting but the length and density is daunting. Do you have any recommendations for other texts to go to first, that are easier to get through?
Some easier works here: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/dessalines_marxism_study_plan.html
Dracula by Bram Stoker: https://archive.org/details/dracula00stok
There are tons of books available here: https://archive.org/details/texts
This isn’t a specific book recommendation, but a project/site. The project’s called StandardEbooks and they clean up the projectgutenberg versions of books to make real good public domain books. At the moment they have some Kropotkin and the Manifesto
Beware with Sherlock Holmes that only 10 of the books were published before 1923, the books published after 1923 are still the property of the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle.
More evidence that copyright law sucks, why should his grandchildren make money with his books? Just get a job like everyone else.
