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.
I’m loving the answers to this two year old question!
My suggestion would be 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was a book that I could not put down.
Tolstoy’s work is all in public domain. Anna Karenina and War and Peace are great. Not the easiest to read, but unparalleled.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ has pretty much all of them
don quixote is great, i reread it recently and had a great time
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.
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.
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.
Allan Quatermain reads like an indiana jones book written in the 19th century.
I also second everything written by Dumas and Verne.
