Books
1. Secret Societies
2. 1984
3. Animal Farm
4. Cicero
5. Catch-22
6. Dumb Witness
7. Lord of the Flies
8. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
9. Ulysses
10. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
11. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
12. Girl With A Pearl Earring
13. Candide
14. For One More Day
15. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
16. King Arthur
17. The War of Art
18. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
19. When You Are Engulfed In Flames
20. Five Little Pigs
21. Boudica by Vanessa Collingridge
On the heels of reading the well researched King Arthur, I decided to snatch this book out of M's stack and give it a read. It was a disappointment, to say the least. There is such scant information on Boudica herself that it barely fills fifty pages, let along 280. While from a journalistic approach, the book depends less on research and more on interview, opinion, and feminist slant. While I don't mind the feminist slant, really, it just started to take away from the main topic of the book. Feminine repression is historical fact. Actually, the last seventy or so pages go on to represent every reincarnation of Boudica as a tool for reinforcing feminine suppression and little on the character herself, while the first 150 pages spent on describing the life and times of Britain during Roman rule and how strong female characters are repressed and despised in Roman society. History is what it is, and we can't really change how we've done, but I just felt that it was less of a historical accounting of the character and a bit misleading on the whole.
22. The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler
I think I picked this book up a few years ago when I started to read quite a bit of Campbell's mythological work as well as tinkering around with my own writing. Unfortunately, this book hardly meets any sort of ambitious level. Rather, is copies Campbell's ideas and cookie cutter fits them into the Hollywood version of storymaking. While I agree with a lot of Campbell's tenets, there are a LOT of ways to tell a good story that do not follow an exact method. While it was a good read to think about characters and ideas, it tends to force you to think that there's only one way to write a movie.
23. A Cat Among Pigeons by Agatha Christie
