How would you like to hear J.R.R. Tolkien as Gollum, or experience how Arthur Conan Doyle would present Sherlock Holmes? Now, thanks to the British Library you can:
Hearing Tolkien's voices — his own and his characters' — is one of the delights of a new audio CD from the British Library's sound archives, "The Spoken Word: Children's Writers," which includes 10 children's-book authors, most of them contemporary. The CD follows two earlier, far more extraordinary discs released in April, "Spoken Word: Writers" and "Spoken Word: Poets," which include only authors born in the 19th century. Some are poets who barely made it into the age of recording (Tennyson) and others Modernists with a surprising streak of the actor (James Joyce).
Writers who seemed beyond our reach are suddenly in our ears, revealing the often startling distance between their voices and the ones we imagine while reading — not to mention the ones that grab us from a movie screen.
Elliot on Prufrock, Milnes on Pooh, Tennyson on the Light Brigade!Sounds like a wonderful gift for the literature lover. Now if we can just get them to release that recording of Faulkner.
[You can order it only from the British Library]
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