Lucas Blogs About Books

wow! much penguin very classics Everyone has literary blindspots. For example, I read The Forever War  more than ten years before I read  Starship Troopers  (For the record, The Forever War is a much better novel, as far as I know it's not intended as a direct response to Starship Troopers , but it definitely answers the question: "What if Starship Troopers  had been a good book?"). But you know, sometimes checking in on a book that you'd previously dismissed is  rewarding, so it never hurts to give something a chance. Previously, I'd dismissed the work of Jane Austen as "rich people socializing" without ever reading it (okay, I'll own up to the fact that there was also more than a little casual sexism involved). But the  trailer for this year's film adaptation looked pretty funny. I still haven't seen it, but I've read the book, so let's see how that turned out. Now, remember, the works of Jane Austen have definitely passed t...

Huh, this is familiar . So, what's this book's de—hey! We had a whole bit about this last time , if you're going to be blogging about each of these novellas individually, you gotta have a picture with their title! My bad! How prescient! That's better. So, then, this book's deal is? Well, like "Uncharted Territory," "Remake" is a sci-fi novella that Connie Willis published in the 1990s. Unlike "Uncharted Territory" it seems to take place on Earth in what must be the early 21st Century. How d'ya figure? Well, one of the characters was born the year Fred Astaire died, which was 1987, meaning that she's only a few years younger than me. It's probably set in the late 2000s or early 2010s. Well, as scintillating as this discussion of how old one of the characters in the story is, would you care to elaborate on its deal? Oh, right. Anyway, we open on our protagonist Tom, an on-again-off-again film student who...

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...