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Shade of Carn Dûm
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Re:
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Quote:<hr> ""Purple prose" indeed!" <hr></blockquote>
Hear, hear!
I have always maintained excellence does not have too much to do with popularity. I quite agree that Britney Spears is yet aother teenybopper phenomenon with no visible talent except projecting the bubblegum image. But there are thousands of brilliant books written in languages less universal than English. They have not been transalated due to various reasons so to declare that LoTR is the book of the century without any exposure to those books is incorrect. You could argue that if they were good enough they would've been translated and distributed to a worldwide audience. It doesn't work that way. How many Sidney Sheldon readers want to read a translated mythological Chinese book? How many want to read something based on the India-Pakistan partition? Who's interested in an account of the ethnis cleansing of Rwanda except the intellectuals of the world? That's how publishers think, and maybe they're right. But the fact remains that readers are not given a chance to make up their own minds about what appeals to them.
Tolkien does not exactly have a worldwide audience either. I would say that in over 90% of Asian and African coutries no one except the literati has even heard of LoTR. And if we're looking for lasting appeal I'd say Gone With the Wind has been around longer and is far more famous than LoTR.
Read Mila 18 by the way. It's an outstanding book.
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