Ode to endangered books in Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2007

STOCKHOLM (AFP) — British novelist and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing hailed the importance of books in her Nobel lecture Friday, juxtaposing poor countries' thirst for knowledge to a lack of interest shown by the young in rich countries.

The 88-year-old author was too ill to travel to Stockholm for the week-long Nobel festivities currently underway, and her lecture, "On not winning the Nobel Prize", was read at the Swedish Academy by her British editor Nicholas Pearson.

"We have a treasure-house -- a treasure -- of literature... It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to be come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be," she wrote.

But, she said, young...