Opening lines from a number of classic novels re-imagined for contemporary readers.

Alice was beginning to tire of sitting by her sister on the bank. She took out her iPhone and played Angry Birds for the next three hours.

How many basic literary plots are there? Depending on how a plot is defined, there could be anywhere from one through to 36 basic storylines.

Attempts to find the number of basic plots in literature cannot be resolved any more tightly than to describe a single basic plot. Foster-Harris claims that all plots stem from conflict. He describes this in terms of what the main character feels: “I have an inner conflict of emotions, feelings…. What, in any case, can I do to resolve the inner problems?” (p. 30-31) This is in accord with the canonical view that the basic elements of plot revolve around a problem dealt with in sequence: “Exposition – Rising Action – Climax – Falling Action – Denouement”.

Via Lone Gunman.

Ebenezer Scrooge, the mean spirited protagonist of English writer Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel A Christmas Carol, may, just may, have been a little more altruistic than we perceived him to be:

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that’s a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?

From an article on the confronting and disturbing nature of contemporary Swedish literature, news that there is soon to be a Hollywood version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Stieg Larsson, died from a heart attack before seeing his international bestselling Millennium trilogy catapult him to the rank of second-bestselling writer on the planet. The film adaptation of his The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is playing in Australia. The producer of No Country for Old Men, Scott Rudin, has just signed a deal to make the Hollywood version.

My question: why?

First there were suggestions that William Shakespeare was assisted by a ghostwriter, now comes a notion – in a new book, “The Man Who Invented Shakespeare”, by German academic Kurt Kreiler – that many Shakespeare works were actually written by the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere.

Edward De Vere also lived in the same area as Shakespeare and scrutiny of specific stanzas of poetry he wrote show their style was not copied anywhere else at the time, except in what we call Shakespearean poems.

De Vere also went by the nickname “Spear-shaker”, conclusive proof I expect…

Why are the books of Charles Dickens still part of many of today’s school curriculums, almost 140 years after he died?

These are all wonderful reasons to read Dickens. But these are not exactly the reasons why I read Dickens. My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came – not surprisingly – from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest. “We need to read Dickens’ novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”

13 titles make it onto this year’s Booker Prize long list. The narrowed down “short list” featuring just six titles will be announced in a month or so.

61 essential postmodern reads: but now to answer the question, how exactly do you decide what is a postmodern book?

The thing about postmodernism is it’s impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern. In looking at the attributes of the essential postmodern reads, we found some were downright contradictory. Postmodern books have a reputation for being massive tomes, like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” – but then there’s “The Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker, which has just 144 pages. And while postmodern books would, you’d think, have to be published after the modern period – in the 20th or 21st centuries – could postmodernism exist without “Tristram Shandy”? We think not.

The cover of the latest print edition of Opium Magazine has been printed with special inks, that if left exposed to sunlight, will over the next one thousand years reveal a nine word short story.

The printing process in question is a simple but, as usual with Keats, pretty clever idea. The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century. “The precise quantity of ink covering each word is different, so that the words will appear one at a time,” Keats said. “Provided that your copy of Opium is kept out in the open, and regularly exposed to sunlight over 1,000 years to be read progressively by the next dozen or so generations.”

Can we set up a seance for sometime in 3009 so that someone can tell me what happens?!

An article by William Boyd on the influence that – in this case – London Parks have had on novelists… otherwise a great read if you are a fan of the parks in and around London.

How many first kisses take place in parks? How often do the first intimations of a future adultery occur? There is, in summer especially, a mild, erotic and sensual undercurrent to park life. Clothes are removed. People sunbathe. Boyfriends and girlfriends can meet and find a quiet corner. In my new novel one of the characters witnesses her lover’s betrayal with another woman in Battersea Park. The somewhat risqué 1933 song “Pettin’ in the Park” gets it just about right: “First you pet a little / Let up a little / And then you get a little kiss.”

PS: some of my photos of Richmond Park, which is to the southwest of London.