Best Books EVER

A conversation with my husband:

DH: How could you not have read “Tale of Two Cities”? It has the most famous opening line ever…
Me: “Call me Ishmael?”
DH: Ok, the second most famous opening line ever.

As it happens, we read the same authors but different books. In grade school I slogged through Dickens’ “Great Expectations” but DH read “Tale Of Two Cities” and so on.

I found lists of the best books ever written, boiled it down to a reasonable number, then downloaded the .epubs from Project Gutenberg. If you like my ebook selection, please donate to Project Gutenberg! These ebooks are all Public Domain in the U.S., that is, legal to download and to share.

The books are in .epub format, suitable for side-loading into your Barnes & Noble Nook
or Amazon Kindle
. There is also an addon for FireFox called EPUBReader.

Download these three .zip archives and enjoy!

Part 1 of 3 – Gutenberg

  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  • Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
  • Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
  • Darkwater by W. E. B. Du Bois
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Eugene Oneguine by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
  • Father Goriot by Honor‚ de Balzac
  • Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  • Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift-images
  • Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • Howards End by E. M. Forster
  • Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront‰
  • Le Mort d’Arthur Volume 1 by Sir Thomas Malory
  • Le Mort d’Arthur Volume 2 by Sir Thomas Malory

Part 2 of 3 – Gutenberg

  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  • Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
  • Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  • Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  • Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge
  • Silas Marner by George Eliot
  • Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
  • Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  • The Ambassadors by Henry James
  • The Golden Bowl by Henry James
  • The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  • The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • The Iliad by Homer
  • The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Part 3 of 3 – Gutenberg

  • The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan by John Bunyan
  • The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper
  • The Portrait of a Lady – Volume 1 by Henry James
  • The Portrait of a Lady – Volume 2 by Henry James
  • The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
  • The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka
  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  • The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
  • The Warden by Anthony Trollope
  • Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
  • Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
  • Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Ulysses by James Joyce
  • Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

 

Enjoy these all-time favorite books from Gutenberg.org.

Project Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

We carry high quality ebooks: All our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.

No fee or registration is required, but if you find Project Gutenberg useful, we kindly ask you to donate a small amount so we can buy and digitize more books. Other ways to help include digitizing more books, recording audio books, or reporting errors.

Photo Credit:
Source Flickr
Author
Cloned Milkmen

One Response to Best Books EVER

  1. Shiva and Jaya

    Miss Boi,

    We has that list, too, but not has downloaded yet since mom buys new library every year and has so much to reading in the next 2 weeks! OMC!

    Next PM meeting be Jan. 14!

    S&J

Bad Behavior has blocked 2984 access attempts in the last 7 days.