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Screenwriting for Dummies by Laura Schellhardt
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United States History to 1877 (HarperCollins College Outline) by John A. Krout
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Abby
posted by ablachly at 4:33 pm (EST) on Sep 22, 2008
It's been several years since I've read those of the books you've listed on your profile that I've actually read (Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; The Epic of Gilgamesh; and Richard Adams' Watership Down), but I can try to noodle on them sometime if you'd like.
I can offer a couple of suggestions on a couple of these books out of the box, though.
First, if you haven't read Robert Silverberg's novel Gilgamesh the King, do so: it's a "realistic" retelling of the epic that nevertheless allows room for the more fantastical elements to breathe, and has an ending that, IMHO, is more tragic and compelling than the ending of the epic itself.
It might not be a bad idea to browse through some background reading for Gilgamesh either: C. Leonard Woolley's The Sumerians (1st pub'ed in 1928, though it's been reprinted several times since) or Facts On File's The Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East by Michael Roaf, or the work of Samuel Noah Kramer (his chapter on Sumerian mythology in the 1961 Mythologies of the Ancient World is a relatively painless introduction to the subject) are good places to start. (I'm assuming that Woolley's ideas are a bit out of date at this point, but I don't recall any terribly jarring discrepancies between The Sumerians and Roaf's Cultural Atlas. Woolley posits that the Sumerians were, for all intents and purposes, proto-Arabs.)
Second, you can, unless you're morbidly curious (or infatuated with Meg Tilly), safely disregard the movie version of The Girl in a Swing (1988; it was the last movie of British horror director Gordon Hessler); come to that, even if you're over the moon about Meg Tilly, you can disregard it: it's the only movie I can think of that has the lead actress nude for so long that her charms actually pall and fail to prop up my flagging interest in the proceedings.
: D
posted by uvula_fr_b4 at 6:29 pm (EST) on Nov 24, 2007
Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
Works of Confucius and Mencius
Plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides
Plays of Aristophanes
Complete works of Plato
Richard Adams, Watership Down, Girl in a Swing
Louis Auchincloss, Rector of Justin, Collected Stories
John Barth, Sot-Weed Factor, Tidewater Tales
Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II
I am currently going through The New Lifetime Reading Plan, and will add more books as I read them.
posted by stavner at 12:25 am (EST) on Dec 24, 2006