Lucas Blogs About Books

My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free-ish, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Where's Waldo Tetralogy by Martin Handford Background Info: So, my research on Wikipedia  tells me that the Where's Waldo books were created by an English illustrator named Martin Handford. Also, that in England, Waldo is named Wally. Also, this is actually a heptalogy, but I only had the first four books when I was a kid, so that's all there is, damnit! So, these aren't books that you read so much, they're fun activity books for kids about finding the eponymous Waldo in a series of increasingly busy illustrations. The books become more difficult as they progress, with less and less of Waldo visible and additional cha...

Ch-ch-ch-changes! But seriously, these images all show roughly the same geographic spot. Obviously at different times and from different angles given the differences in the mountains in the background, and . . . I'm over-explaining. My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free-ish, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Godserfs Trilogy by N.S. Dolkart Since this series just finished publishi ng last year, I want to be clear, there are definitely SPOILERS ahead. Background Info: So, this is a fantasy trilogy I've been reading for the last three years. Wait, that makes it sound like it's taken me three years to read it. It's a fantasy trilogy in which a book has been published and then read by me in each of t...

Well, it may be my least favorite of the three, but I do think Mockingjay has the best cover. My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins Background Info: I mean, you've probably heard of the Hunger Games trilogy or at least the tetralogy of films based on it (they were fairly popular, Jennifer Lawrence played the lead and they even got famous and well-regarded actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland and others to play the grown-ups). But if you're completely unaware, the books take place at some unspecified future date when the North American continent is ruled by the repressive government o...

wow. much professional. very photo-editing. My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The X-Wing Ennealogy by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston Background info: All right, so I'm definitely not doing individual entries for each of the books in the series. Because, you know, I'm not a masochist. Also, it's been awhile since I read them, so I mostly just remember the series' broad strokes. But what I will do is lump them together into the smaller series they form. So let's just establish what you'll need to know before picking up book one. So, it's been about two and a half years since Return of the Jedi . Following the death of Emperor Palpatine, the...

WITNESS ME! My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Wastelanders Duology by K.S. Merbeth Background Info: Not a lot really, K.S. Merbeth published her debut novel, Bite  in 2016, and followed it up with Raid  a year later. They're a couple of fun (depending on your definition of the term) sci-fi novels set in a Mad Max-ian post apocalyptic wastleland. Only the twist is, instead of seeing this world through the eyes of a heroic figure who tries to bring order or rebuild society, we're seeing it through the eyes of people who are thriving off of the chaos, bloodshed, and cannibalism of the new world disorder. So yeah, if you've ever seen movies like  The Road Warrior , ...

Ooh, looks like someone rolled the dice after watching season one on Netflix. My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman Background Info: You may be familiar with Syfy's television program The Magicians , if so, you probably won't be surprised to find out that they're based on the Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman. Both have their merits and demerits, but I'm not here to talk about the TV show (they're different, but not enough to make a worthwhile Oddaptations ). I'm here to talk specifically about the books. And if there's one thing you need to know about these books before I summarize them, it's that all the charac...

Nice comic books, NEEERRRDDD! My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: Silver Surfer (Volumes 7 and 8) written by Dan Slott, drawn by Michael Allred, colors by Laura Allred Background Info: The Silver Surfer was created by Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four #48. He was the herald of Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, who ultimately turned against his master and helped the Fantastic Four drive him away. For his betrayal, Galactus dismissed the Surfer but placed a barrier around the Earth trapping his former servant on Earth. Since then he's been the star of several limited series from Marvel, each one making up a "volume," the most recent is the only one I've actually read, and t...

Eat yer heart out cover artist for Gordon R. Dickson's The Right to Arm Bears ! My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but, you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Ack-Ack Macaque trilogy by Gareth L. Powell Background Info: So, you may recall that in 2013  Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie won the British Science Fiction Award (and several others) for Best Novel. It was actually a tie that year. The other winner was Gareth L. Powell's Ack-Ack Macaque . As one might expect, Ack-Ack Macaque  is very different from Ancillary Justice , you may have guessed from the titles and cover art that this series has a more humorous bent than the Imperial Radch trilogy (though I will say that Ann Leckie's books do have plenty...

Where's The Silmarillion ? You might ask. Do you think I'm made of time? My feverish pursuit of MOAR content brought forth this feature: Simplified Series. Here's the pitch: quick synopses (I'll try and keep them spoiler-free, but you know, most of these are past the statute of limitations on spoilers) of the entries in a series followed by the reasons you should or shouldn't read it. This week: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings  by JRR Tolkien Background Info: I mean, you know what these are. Anyway, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a philologist, which is what a linguist was called before the academic underpinnings of modern linguistics were developed in the early 20th century. Ever since his youth, one of his hobbies was inventing constructed languages  (conlangs). And really, it was this hobby that lead him to begin writing his Middle-Earth novels and stories. After all, what good is a conlang without anyone to speak it? So, he started working on The Si...