Lucas Blogs About Books

Recycled photo FTW! The Intro Welcome back to  Whan That Month  — Lucas Blogs About  The Canterbury Tales .  Last month  I tackled the first half of the fourth fragment and talked about how "The Clark's Tale" didn't really do it for me. This month we're closing out that fragment and talking about "The Merchant's Tale." Will my opinion be any different? Let's find out. But first let's talk about: The Merchant's Prologue Turns out that the Merchant knows a thing or two about unhappiness in marriage because he spends pretty much all of his prologue complaining about his wife. Turns out that unlike the patient Grisildis, she's a nagging shrew who would even overwhelm the devil if they were married. Even though they've only been married for two months, he swears by Saint Thomas (yes, that Saint Thomas) that no other man could know more of unhappiness in marriage than he. Harry Bailly interrupts him to encourage him to begin— The Merch...

A 2000s sci-fi period piece you say? Tell me more.   So, what's this book's dea—Wait a minute, it's by Lindsay Ellis, the YouTuber? Yes, that Lindsay Ellis. She wrote a book? She wrote a book. I like her video essays. As do I. In fact, that's how I found out that she wrote a book. Wanna talk about the book? Yeah. Okay. So it's 2007, and Nils Ortega has just leaked a government memo detailing the fact that the US government has been hiding a group of aliens for decades, and that scientists have made no progress in attempting to communicate with them. Enter Nils's estranged daughter Cora Sabino who's just trying to get by at a temp job after dropping out of UCI, when she finds herself under surveillance by the FBI following both the release of the Fremda document and the Ampersand Incident. Ampersand Incident? It's the codename for a recent meteorite strike in Southern California. In light of the recent leaks and the fact that the government is being parti...

I took the dust jacket off while reading this one in the break room at work. What in the world possessed me to read a book about Josef Mengele, the Nazi scientist known as "the Angel of Death" for his horrific experiments on children at Auschwitz? Well, I was initially drawn to it because the author, David G. Marwell, is a historian who worked with the Justice Department to help track down Mengele (or rather, his remains) in the 1980s, and I felt a morbid curiosity about how exactly Mengele managed to evade capture for nearly forty-four years. Also, I remember I was annoyed with the role he played in Amazon's The Man in the High Castle adaptation, where he's depicted as one of the scientists testing out a machine to travel between worlds. I mean, seriously, Mengele had doctorates in medicine and anthropology. He didn't have the background in theoretical physics that would be necessary to build a portal. That said, he definitely would be interested in performing ex...

Hold the phone! Is this going to be an annual thing ? Why not, Hypothetical Reader? People love annual events commemorating someone's birth: Christmas, Lincoln's Birthday, Martin Luther King Day. But those are all people who are widely admired. Fair enough. Wanna talk about Art Brut? Do you mean art brut like Outsider Art ? No, I mean, Art Brut, the indie rock group fronted by Eddie Argos . I'm going to regret this, but could you describe their sound? Sure. Art Brut has a kind of mid-2000s British dance punk-ish sound with spoke-sung semi-ironic lyrics. Honestly, that sounds even worse than Neutral Milk Hotel. Oh, yeah, they're definitely not as good as Neutral Milk Hotel. But the lyrics have a sort of mordant charm. If you say so. I do say so. Anyway, you know how over the course of 10+ years a lot bands will mature and grow their sound and outlook. Yeah. Art Brut steadfastly refuses to do that. The songs off of their most recent album sound like they could have come o...