Lucas Blogs About Books

By now you shouldn't be surprised that it's the same old photo.   The Intro Welcome back to  What That Month   — Lucas Blogs About The Canterbury Tales . Last month I closed out the fourth fragment with a discussion of The Merchant's Tale. While I wasn't crazy about it, it did at least complement  The Clerk's Tale  which preceded it. This month I hope to read the entirety of the fifth fragment, which comprises The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale. This raises an important question, namely: The "Wait a Minute, What Exactly is a Franklin?" Way back in the fourteenth century, when Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales , a franklin was one of the social classes. Specifically a franklin was a free man, that is to say, not a serf. To be more specific, by Chaucer's time, a franklin was a landowner who wasn't a member of the gentry or the nobility. The Squire's Prologue Okay, so maybe the fourth and fifth fragment aren't as separat...

Hey, no regular post this week. You know, because I gave myself the week off for Thanksgiving. I hope whatever your plans are that you and your loved ones will be safe this year. I know that it hasn't been a great year, but I do find myself with a few things to be grateful for. In any case, instead of talking about that, let's talk about a big corporation (allegedly) screwing over a writer! That's right, last week Alan Dean Foster (ghostwriter of the novelization of the first Star Wars film, and the author of the first Star Wars Expanded Universe novel, The Splinter of the Mind's Eye ) and the grievance committee of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) released a public statement accusing Disney of not paying Foster the royalties he is owed for books now published by Disney. Specifically the two Star Wars books I mentioned before (which Disney acquired publishing rights to when they purchased Lucasfilm) and the novelizations of the first three Alie...

  For real? You just had used the inOpportune cOntent rePlacement proceSs last month for your birthday! I know, I've just been really busy at work lately so I wasn't able to get anything ready to post this week. I don't even have a subject for this particular OOPS! But look at this way, it's like you get two weeks off in a row, Hypothetical Reader. That's not how that works. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾. Whatever. I'm really tired. Posting will resume next Monday. But that's Thanksgiving week, please tell me that you have more planned for that than just a one paragraph Thanksgiving message. No comment. You're the worst, Lucas.

Abandon all hope, ye who read . . .   Don't read this blog post. Go read this book. Okay, I'm being a little disingenuous, I would like you to continue reading this blog post, I wanna talk about Evan Dahm's The Harrowing of Hell . That said, I kinda think that it's best experienced on its own terms. Also, I'mma SPOIL  the hell out of it (to the extent that any story based on millennia-old texts can be spoiled). So, if you don't want your first reading tainted by my opinions (I find that once, again, I am being disingenuous. Let's face it, it's hard to go into a story about Jesus free of preconceptions.), then just close the tab and go out and read the book first. Otherwise, let's talk about it. As the title suggests, The Harrowing of Hell  recounts the events between Jesus's death and resurrection, when he is said to have descended into Hell in order to save every righteous person who had predeceased him. This story is told in the apocryphal Gosp...

Shiny! So, that's this book's deal? Well, Hypothetical Reader, The Empire of Gold  is the conclusion to S.A. Chakraborty's Daevabad Trilogy that began in The City of Brass and continued with The Kingdom of Copper . Oh, yeah, it's that series about genies! Djinn. They prefer to be called djinn. Most of them, some of them prefer to be called daevas. Hence Daevabad. And that's where the SPOILER free portion of this post ends. If you haven't read the first two books, go back and read those. Anyway, here's a quick recap of the story so far: Nahri is a conwoman in Egypt during the Napoleonic Wars who longs to become a doctor. One day she accidentally summons an ifrit but is saved by a dashing daeva named Dara who reveals that she's a shafit (that is to say, someone of mixed human and djinn heritage). He takes her to the city of Daevabad which was once ruled by her ancestors, the Nahid clan. That is, until they got a little too genocide-y and were overthrown b...

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...