Talk Back

[twunny]

Never assigned this book. Pretty glad about that. I'm not sure what to make of it. It's a "classic" yes. But I didn't find it that great.
The freakishly long and involved family tree of ever single character was annoying. The fact that there were so many characters in the first place was annoying-er. If Achilles kills 20 people in one battle, do I need to know all their names, and the names of all their fathers?
And to further frustrate the reader, some of the cool characters seem to vanish for no reason, for hundreds of pages. Just when I was starting to care about Diomedes and what he was all about, he...I don't even know for sure. To the best of my recollection, he's fighting one minute, gone the next, and then back running a chariot race near the end. Flabbergasting.
This may be a sacrilege of some sort, but I feel I need to say it:
REMAKE.
If someone can get away with a shot-by-shot remake of "Psycho," one of the best 100 or so movies ever made (with characters who vanish with good reason and you do not need to know their ancestry back to Adam) then I think someone needs to hack away at The Iliad and make it kick as much ass as it should. The battle scenes were great, the story was great, I even enjoyed some of the *shudder* dialogue. But there are too many things that need fixing for me to say I enjoyed it.
Why?! Why TWO guys named Aias? ??? And it didn't even get to the bit about the large wooden horse. That's in Odyssey, apparently.

And one more thing: I know Hollywood directors are a little insane, but what was the deal with "Troy"? How were there no Gods in that movie? They are EVERYWHERE in the written material. I think it could have been pulled off, without becoming "Jason and the Argonauts"-ey.

Fine, go ahead, read The Iliad. But don't assign it.
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