Madeline Miller's top 10 classical books | Books | guardian.co.uk

Obviously I love a list, which is why Madeline Miller's top 10 classical books | Books | guardian.co.uk: caught my eye.

A top ten! Classical Greece! A winning combination. Throw in a crisp cold bottle of French viognier and it would be a perfect date.

But wait a minute: Homer only makes no 4. Are they mad? ARE THEY MAD?

And who the heck is Philoctetes when he is at home? Oh COME ON! GIVE US A BREAK....!

'via Blog this'

Madonna | W.E. movie trailer | someone laid an egg

Good ol' Madge. You can always trust her to come up with something genuinely surprising. Of course, it has been a while since she was regularly coming up with nice surprises. Good singles, for example. Interesting music videos. These days it's mainly bad surprises: children's books of shockingly low quality; movies that should never have been made... that sort of thing.

Of course perhaps W.E. will be wonderful. But you just know it won't be. The Cannes audiences have been watching it with their jaws dropping open. And certainly this trailer isn't making me think: 'must go and spend a tenner at the cinema to watch that!' It's making me think: adults made this?

The Guardian's Xan Brooks certainly isn't impressed (click here).

Edinburgh International Book Festival | Guardian Debate | NOT The End of Books

The Guardian sponsored debate The End of Books at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday was entertaining enough - but it missed the point.

Ewan Morrison's talk in favour of the motion – the end is nigh, etc, reproduced on guardian.com at the moment - was considered and laden with stats. But I still think his take on the issue is wrong. The other speakers concentrated on the novelty of producing an iPad app of The Waste Land and the love of holding a paperback in your hands. Both these things seem as transient as the other to me.

Digital or paper, there will always be a demand for new authors, new voices, because each generation needs to recreate the world in its own image. I wonder how many kids now will read (and watch ) A Game of Thrones instead of Lord of the Rings. How many Harry Potter fanatics have ever read The Famous Five? Ewan seemed to suggest that publishers and Amazon -- the digital publishing giant of the near future [ie evil empire] -- will simply reproduce and mash up old writing and sell it anew. New writers will soon be on the scrap heap forced to take jobs in call centres rather than follow their calling by producing potential Booker Prize winners.

Ewan even referred to Shakespeare and Dickens as if they were getting by on modest advances awarded to them simply because their work was considered (by who? The great and the good?) to be artistically worthwhile. In reality, Wills and Charles were two of the most commercially successful writers of all time. Neither would recognise the current economic realities of the publishing / literary world, but they'd want to get paid.

The attraction of digital is that it allows a writer to bypass the traditional publishing log jam. Self publishing is no longer the resort of the vain but a decent option for a new talent wanting to showcase him or herself. A few have even made good money out of self Kindle publishing -- Amanda Hocking etc. But can the trick these genre writers have pulled off be repeated in the literary fiction world?

The fact is: lit-fic simply isn’t as popular as other genres and it is hard to feel sorry for well educated, talented author wannabes who would rather spend their days in a garret writing prose no one wants to read instead of holding down a proper job. Dedicate your life to literature if you want, but do it at your own expense.

How to write a novel (like I know)

Robert McCrum in The Guardian usually has something interesting to say about writing and books but his latest blog left me wondering if I'm on the same planet as many other bibliophiles.
The piece asks whether writing classes are a waste of time. It's a valid enough question as we seem to be living through a boom period for them. Writing a novel, selling it for a million pounds and becoming pleasantly famous and well thought of as a result, has of late become a middle class equivalent of the National Lottery. Bored with being a lawyer/accountant/doctor? Then why not write a visceral account of your life in about 80,000 words and spend the rest of your days talking about it at book festivals (which you increasingly like to hang about in anyway since you stopped buying new music in 2003).
Creative writing classes have sprung up to feed this ambition. I can understand that. I've been writing books, as yet unpublished, for X years now. It's a frustrating business and I've often considered signing up for a course but usually I am put off by a number of factors. It's not the cost though. usually it is an uncertainty that a particular course could give me anything I couldn't get either under my own steam, or from my extremely experienced author wife. Course satisfaction also seems bound up with who your tutor is - another literary lottery.
But there is a role for creative writing classes however, and in this I think we can learn from American screen writing courses. Structure is what makes the difference between a well written novel and an unputdownable novel. Structure is all important in thrillers, comedies, sci-fi, and yes even literary novels (whatever they really are).
McCrum's post and the comments from the dozens of readers seem to confuse good writing with good prose. But prose, like coming up with good ideas, is something pretty much anyone can do. The trick is to string enough good prose together to make a novel.