Coming up: Robert Shea Week/All Things Are Lights

Robert Shea. (Photo from official website).

Back in 2020, I did a "Robert Shea Week" to highlight information about Robert Anton Wilson's writing partner for Illuminatus! I see Robert Shea as an interesting writer and interesting figure in his own right; I don't want him to be forgotten or overlooked. Hence my posts about him and the "Robert Shea Resources" links at the right side of the page.

I want to do another Robert Shea Week. I am still working on ideas for it, but I am looking at doing it in May.

And for one of the upcoming blog posts, I want to discuss All Things Are Lights, Shea's historical novel set during the Middle Ages. It is my favorite Shea novel (so far; I want to finish reading all of his work) and it was the favorite of writer Patricia Monaghan, who was married to Shea when he died back in 1994. Here is a post where I talk about it a bit in connection to Illuminatus!

So I want to re-read All Things Are Lights, and invite everyone else who follows the blog to read it, and I'll post about it as one of my posts for Robert Shea Week, and anybody who chose to read it, or who remembers it, can comment. This won't be an online reading group in the sense of spending weeks on it, bit by bit, but I will be inviting discussion in a single blog post, in the comments.

Mike Shea, Robert Shea's son, has released the text of the book under the Creative Commons license. As I understand it, if you want to option it for a movie, you still have to pay him, but if you just want to read it, you can find a free digital edition. The official Shea website, which Mike Shea maintains, has a link to the Kindle edition ($5, I bought a copy) but also to a free version in HTML. And if you just want to read it for free, there are various other places to get a copy, such as at the Internet Archive. If you download an Epub version, you can read it on your phone with various ereaders, and Amazon now supports Epub for its Kindles. If you prefer print, you should be able to hunt up a used copy somewhere. 

And if anyone has a suggestion on what else I can do for Robert Shea Week, please offer it. I have some of my own ideas, but any suggestions would be welcome. See the link above for what I posted the last time.