lit news

[Christopher Tassava]

This stuff came through on the email "news" service, NEWSpot Morning Edition 
@ 1/20/97.  It might be of interest, if only as indicators...

*** Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' top book for Britains

Britains voted J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," a myth about
hobbits and elves, as top book of the century, according to a survey.
George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" were second and third in the
poll of more than 25,000 people, conducted by booksellers Waterstone's
to pick their top books of the last century. Six Nobel Prize winners
including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Steinbeck, William Golding and
Albert Camus were also among the top 100. "Ulysses" by James Joyce,
"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller, "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D.
Salinger, "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, "100 Years of
Solitude" by Marquez, "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck and
Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting" rounded out the top ten.

*** Hong Kong prefers Internet to Shakespeare

The works of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Jane Austen have been removed
from shelves of the British Council in Hong Kong due to a lack of
demand. Some 20,000 volumes of Western classical literature have been
replaced by video and computer terminals for surfing the Internet
after records showed no one had borrowed the books for at least a
year. About 10,000 books by contemporary British authors remain. "I
personally think that reading a book is different from watching a
video," a spokeswoman said. "But the bottom line is public demand."


Xferen

"... And then, from behind the parted clouds,	Ivan Turgenev,
 blue sky would appear, lucid and smiling,	"Sketches from
 like a beautiful eye."				a Hunter's Album"