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.
For Dutch an important source of public domain literature is the Database voor de Nederlandse letteren (dbnl), in cooperation of the Nederlandse taalunie (Dutch Language Union) with several heritage libraries and the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library).
My favourite book you can find on there is probably De stille kracht (The silent force) by Louis Couperus. It’s about a high ranking Dutch colonial family living in a town in East Java, and also the people around them, trying to get the Indies to follow their rules, to be what they want it to be, but in the end failing miserably.
There’s always a lingering feeling of impending doom which, though it goes more to the background at times, never fully goes away. I love it.
De stille kracht is well-known as far as Dutch novels go, there are translations in major European languages (even one in Finnish!).