'Delhi Safari' "wows" Annecy audience; 'Jungle Book' series to come to the USA

In my opinion, The Jungle Book -- both 1894-95 volumes, which include Kipling's other animal tales like "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" and "The White Seal", not just the Mowgli stories -- and Carroll's 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the 1871 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, are still very enjoyable and well worth reading today. If you are just now discovering them, you are in for a treat!

These have long outlasted most Victorian literature, which mostly (in my limited experience) featured "average man" protagonists who spent all day sleeping and all night at their clubs playing cards and getting drunk. If they should ever want to know what was going on in the world around them, which they almost never did, they would send out their butler to buy a newspaper. I have mentioned before Edgar Fawcett's 1889 Solarion: A Romance, which gets my vote as the worst anthropomorphic novel ever written. Aside from other modern howlers, its romantic interest is the pure young maiden Celia Effingham, the epitome of all that is good and holy of the fairer sex, who spends all day playing tennis while her servants care for her in the background. These and hundreds of non-'morphic Victorian novels are forgotten, while Carroll and Kipling live on. (Even Kipling wrote a lot that has been forgotten, though, like his Thy Servant, a Dog, which is a tale of how much jolly fun English foxhunting is, narrated by Boots, the dog. Even the fox enjoys such jolly good sport! Er, no; I don't think so. This novel was considered well-written but outdated when it was published in 1930.)