20 Great Authors (and Actors) Read Famous Literature Out Loud

Every now and then, the Open Culture site presents vintage clips of great authors reading classic literary works – works they have often written themselves. These are interesting because you get to hear the author's voice and their characterisations, which might or might not chime in with your own ideas.

Also featured here are some authors reading other people's work and a few classic clips of famous actors giving literary readings.

World Music in our libraries

We've just expanded our World Music Collection with a new range of CDs covering a wide range of music from Irish folk to Congolese Soukous; Brazilian hip-hop to Bollywood; yodelling to salsa.

The extended collection also includes The Rough Guide To The Music Of... series and Rough Guides to different styles of World Music. If you want to get a flavour of some of this music we have a selection loaded onto a listening post in the Wheatsheaf Library.

World Music Collection CDs are available in Castleton, Middleton, Norden and the Wheatsheaf libraries. When Heywood Library reopens next year it, too, will have CDs from this collection.

They are available for loan to anybody over the age of 14, costing 50p for a three-week loan (25p for Passport To Leisure card holders).

Audio items in our libraries

We're often asked why we don't have the current Top 10 available in our libraries' audio collections. Unfortunately, we can't: one of the conditions of the national agreement made between public libraries and the British Phonographic Industry is that we have to hold back new releases for three months so that it's less likely that library stock would be the source of pirate copies. This means that we're nearly always making material available some weeks after they've been in the charts.

The month that we're making a title available in our libraries can be seen in the "Status" column in the Web Catalogue record. Items that will be made available this month have the status "September release."

Titles you can look forward to this month include:

• Bon Jovi: Lost Highway
• Mutya Buena: Real Girl
• Kelly Clarkson: My December
• Enrique Inglesias: Insomniac
• Marilyn Manson: Eat Me, Drink Me
• Oasis: Don't Believe the Truth
• Queens of the Stone Age: Era Vulgaris
• Rihanna: Good Girl Gone Bad
• The Travelling Wilburys: The Travelling Wilburys Collection
• The White Stripes: Icky Thump
• Club Nights: Live It
• Clubbers Guide Summer 2007
• Over The Rainbow
• Twice As Nice Urban Anthems

We currently charge 50p for each three-week loan of audio items (25p for Passport to Leisure holders).