School is finally out for us and we’ve moved into our summer schedule, though you wouldn’t know it from the weather—we had a grey, rainy summer solstice this weekend. Today’s stack doesn’t have a specific theme; it’s primarily comic books, but I’ve also got a couple of joke books in there for good measure—just a few books that I’ve read recently!
These two joke books are small hardcovers, compact enough to carry around for on-the-go joke sharing, and have a lot of little illustrations scattered throughout the books. Although the books are the same size, the science book is a bit denser, with 230 jokes compared to the 165 cat jokes. The vast majority of jokes are riddles, though there are also some knock-knock jokes and one-liners. Both books will be published in August.
The legend continues in this graphic novel series based on the popular mobile app. It’s fun to see how each book takes a particular character or two from the game and turns them from a generic class to a specific individual. This volume takes us to the Goblin village, where we meet Crag and Crag Junior. Old Crag doesn’t really hang out much with the other Goblins because they think he’s a bit looney: he has stories of a giant lava monster living deep under the village, and is building a giant rocket as an escape plan. Meanwhile, Crag Junior meets Joe, a miner who happens to speak a little bit of Goblinish. Although the humans and Goblins don’t typically cooperate with each other, Crag Junior recruits Joe to dig down to find out whether these stories of a giant monster are true after all.
In the previous books, whenever the Goblins are talking, the book uses a weird hieroglyphic font to disguise their words (though with some effort you can decipher it). This time, since the book takes place mostly in Goblinish, it’s the humans who speak in gibberish, and there’s even a scene from an earlier book that we see replayed from the Goblin’s point of view. Crag Junior is caught between worlds—he loves his dad but he has a hard time simply rejecting all the other Goblins as wrong. And when Joe helps him dig down below the village, they make a discovery that brings yet another challenge for Crag Junior. My middle schooler has really been enjoying this series and has re-read all the books multiple times, and I like the way that the books have really created some narrative depth and individuality for these characters.
In the story of Huck Finn, Huck runs away with Jim, an enslaved Black man, and they have a series of adventures. Walker and Anderson take the skeleton of Mark Twain’s tale and give it a new life in this graphic novel, told this time from Jim’s point of view. I heard a radio interview with Walker in which he said one of the big questions he had even when reading Huckleberry Finn as a kid was: why did they flee to the south? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go north instead? Intrigued, I picked up a copy at the bookstore.
It can be hard to have a conversation about guns in America that isn’t immediately polarized, a stalemate between the Constitutional right to bear arms and the undeniable results of gun-related violence. This book is an attempt by Cowen and Wexler (themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum) to try to dig into the question in a way that allows everyone to feel heard.
The framing story is about Maggie and Adam, a young couple in Austin who are considering starting a family. After a mugging at gunpoint, they find themselves disagreeing about the best course of action. Maggie is scared that the muggers may track them down and would feel safer if they had a gun for protection, which shocks Adam, who feels that guns lead to escalation and are unnecessarily risky. They argue with each other, and also have conversations with various friends and coworkers. They even go to a shooting range and learn to shoot guns.
Over the course of the book, a lot of the arguments both for and against gun ownership are presented by various characters, but Maggie and Adam also often have flights of imagination, picturing exaggerated situations involving guns and attackers. When Adam shifts his position and decides maybe guns are a good idea, Maggie finds herself turned off by his new ultra-macho behavior. It takes a while before the two are able to figure out where they stand, and whether their differences are irreconcilable.
While I think it’s a laudable to try to open up the conversation about guns in a way that is a little less combative, I don’t know that the book changed my mind much, or introduced perspectives for either side that were new to me. There were parts of the book that felt a little caricatured or oversimplified, and it also felt like things wrapped up in a tidy way that didn’t feel entirely realistic. It could be a starting point for a conversation if people are willing to read it first, though.
I’ve got a stack of movie-related books that is probably more and more overdue that I’ve started to read lately, and I’ve also been picking back up on a few book series. I just finished the latest City Spies novel by James Ponti, and I’ve started the sixth book in Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is super hefty! In the queue I’ve got The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal (in the Lady Astronaut series), and I’m excited for Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman, set in the same world as her Serafina novels.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these titles except for Big Jim and the White Boy. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
Source: geekdad.com