Project Gutenberg book recs!

[coraa]

I'm going on a weekend trip to Tahoe this week, and it's going to be my first chance to actually use the Kindle for one of the purposes for which I bought it: being able to travel without hauling my body weight in books along with me. To that end, I'm hunting down out-of-copyright books I can upload to it before I go.

So: recommend me things! Ideally either things that are already available on Project Gutenberg, or that are otherwise available freely online (plain text, html, .doc or.pdf all work, although pdfs with tons of images or really odd formatting sometimes transfer weirdly), and I'll upload them and take a look. :D I will give anything a shot, but I am particularly fond of medieval literature, Regency and Victorian social novels, and fantasy, mythology and folklore of all stripes.

(A specific request to people who are familiar with Trollope: I read The Eustace Diamonds and really liked it -- got any suggestions for what to try next?)

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Trollope: Well, the rest of the Palliser novels are good, though The Eustace Diamonds is my favorite. Of the Barchester novels, I like best Barchester Towers and Framley Parsonage (which is what papersky's Tooth and Claw is based on). Probably my favorite of the standalone novels is He Knew He Was Right.

Have you read any Elizabeth Gaskell? She's a lesser-known but wonderful Victorian novelist, very concerned with social issues. Mary Barton is a good place to start, and I also love her last novel, Wives and Daughters, dearly.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Framley Parsonage! You know, I'd planned on reading that after I read Tooth and Claw and then it slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder.

I haven't read any Gaskell, but I think I've heard of Wives and Daughters. I'll give Mary Barton a try to start.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Well you know about the Baen Free Library, right? :)

You might like Catherine Asaro (i believe "Primary Inversion" is her first book,) and i forget, have you tried reading any of David Weber's Honor Harrington series? There are a lot of them on there. I'm sure there's other things you could find there if you poked about the list of authors :)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ooh. I've been meaning to try Catherine Asaro.

(I read a couple of Honor Harrington books long, long ago, and I remember being entertained but thinking that Honor was perhaps a bit too perfect -- might be a good chance to give them another go, though.)

[erinpie.livejournal.com]

All righty! Manybooks.net also has a lot of books. I downloaded the entire Jane Austen works for my eReader, and they also have lots of other stuff in the public domain. I just checked and they have them in Kindle format too. Which I would bet you've read already but you might as well put them on if you have space, right? :)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! I'd actually been looking to get some Austen on my reader, and that's much simpler than converting Gutenberg HTML. :)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I would like to take another moment to reiterate that you are awesome for pointing me to this site. They also have Trollope and The Forme of Cury and The Golden Bough. Hurrah!

[erinpie.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!! I'm so glad you like it. :)

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

Looking at manybooks, here's some that I like:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (I read and enjoyed most or all of his short stories)
Rose in bloom by Lousia May Alcott (Little women is also good, but you're more likely to have read it already -- and while much of what she writes is amusing, it's difficult to stomach more than one novel's worth of morals at a time)
Most of Jane Austen's novels (for the record, I like everything but Emma; Northanger Abbey is different from the rest -- if you realize that it's supposed to be a parody of a gothic horror novel it makes much more sense than as a straight book)
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (it's been a long time since I read it, but worth reading at least once)
I like Lucy Maud Montgomery -- you might try some of the short stories or Rilla of Ingleside -- they show the time period really well.
and I have heard good things of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome but I haven't read more than a few pages so far (it's on my stack to read right now)

At Baen I've liked:
1632 by Eric Flint (but couldn't read the third book)
On Basilisk station by David Weber (but couldn't read the second book)
The Sheepfarmer's daughter by Elizabeth Moon (Loved the trilogy, which is really more of a really long book in sections. Unfortunately, SPL doesn't have the latter books, so it's ILL time if you like it.)
Please let me know if there's other stuff you've gotten excited about that's there -- it's kind of hard to dig through to figure out what I might like.

Um. That's probably enough for now.