Lucas Blogs About Books

This book has everything! Pocket watches, spiders, pistols, that thing where you keep a reanimated mouse skeleton as a pet. So, what's this book's de—Oh, it's a sequel to that book you blogged about last May. You mean Unnatural Magic ? Well, kinda. Whaddya mean kinda? How can something "kinda" be a sequel? Well, it is by the same writer, C.M. Waggoner, and it does take place in the same world, and one of the characters is the daughter of Jeckran and Tsira from Unnatural Magic . You're doing a very bad job of convincing me that this isn't a sequel. I can see that now, yes. It's just that the story doesn't really have anything much to do with the story of Unnatural Magic . Both stories are entirely self-contained. You don't need to have read Unnatural Magic to make sense of  The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry .   Gotcha. But that title's a bit of a mouthful. It is. Anyway, let's jump in. The story starts with Dellaria Wells — usua...

OH! MY! GOD! The eyes of TJ Eckleburg represented Galactus this whole time! That's right, it's another one of those Hypothetical Reader-less blog posts. Let's just jump in:  Vol. 12 – To All the Squirrels I've Loved Before  collects the four final issues of Ryan North and Derek Charm's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl  (colors by Rico Renzi, covers by Erica Henderson). I'm not gonna make any bones about it, this has been my favorite comic book of the last few years and I'm sad that I won't get to read any more of it. But let's talk about this collection before we get any farther. Doreen Green (aka the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl) is looking for her friend Brian Drayne (secretly the reformed supervillain turned superhero Brain Drain — look he's a brain and eyes that are kept alive in a jar sitting on top of a robot body. Turns out that nobody's seen him for a few days, however, Doreen has been receiving a series of texts that appear to be p...

Too bad I don't have a van to airbrush this on. So, what's this book's dea — again? C'mon, Hypothetical Reader, this is the penultimate volume of my favorite comic book. Can we drop the "Hypothetical Reader hates Squirrel Girl" routine. I am only as you write me. Oh, right. Anyway, it's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 11 – Call Your Squirrelfriend  written by Ryan North, drawn by Derek Charm, and colored by Rico Renzi. Wanna talk about it? Fine. So, this volume starts off with a single issue story where Kang the Conqueror (a time-traveller who uses time travel and his 41st century technology to defeat his enemies) confronting Old Lady Squirrel Girl in a dystopian future. See, he's lured her into a building that he rigged to collapse on her forty years ago; only it doesn't collapse because the present day Squirrel Girl noticed the problem and fixed it in an earlier timeline. However, when Kang confronts her he's pertu...

Drunken monkeys? Tell me more. So, what's this book's deal? Well, do you remember Robert Evans from cracked.com ? He's the guy who did stuff like go into active war zones to talk to people about their experiences ? Yes, yes he did. He's not with Cracked anymore, but when he was he wrote a book called A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization. How would you describe the genre? Oh, um, I guess this is loosely, a popular science book, although it does also have a lot of stuff about history and sociology, so maybe it's more of a hodgepodge. It's maybe more of a collection of essays exploring various things that are considered vices in modern society: drugs, prostitution, and being an asshole. It doesn't necessarily advocate for or against any of those things, Evans is more interested in exploring the ways in which these behaviors (and society's reaction to them) has shaped our modern world. He also includes instructions fo...

In the grim darkness of . . . oh, who gives a fuck? So, what's this book's deal? Okay, so what if—GET THIS!—what if there was a fantasy setting where bands of mercenaries were like rock bands and—GET THIS!—they put on shows in huge arenas and—GET THIS!—they lived hard on the road and—GET THIS!—they had legions of fans following them on tour but—GET THIS!—instead of playing music they slaughtered monsters in gladiatorial combat. Well, I think I've got that and, I gotta say, that sounds kinda awesome. Or it would if you hadn't made such a big deal out of the parallels. Huh, I wonder if anyone told Nicholas Eames that while he was writing this book. This is gonna be a short one. Because like Into the Drowning Deep , I didn't finish reading Bloody Rose . Unlike Drowning , I only made it about a fifth of the way in before giving up. This book kinda blows. Kind of harsh for a book you barely started. Speaking of getting started: Our protagonist, Tam Hashford...

You can kinda judge this one by its cover. So, what's this book's deal? Space Opera  is a Hugo-nominated sci-fi comedy premised around a pan-galactic version of the Eurovision Song Contest. Oh, a low-stakes affair? Nope! The very fate of the Earth itself hangs in the balance. See, after the last big interplanetary war, the sentient species of the galaxy instituted the Metagalactic Grand Prix as a way of sorting out the people from the meat. That's sort of an artless way of putting it. Anyway, an alien who looks like a turquoise flamingo with an anemone on it's head appears to every human simultaneously to explain that their only chance to prove their worth as a species is to not come in dead last in the next Grand Prix. Should they come in last, the planet will be destroyed. And you say this is a comedy? Indeed. It is a very silly book. And honestly, that silliness is somewhat infectious. It starts off with a whole chapter that basically posits the boo...

You maniacs! So What's this book's deal? Well, Life is Too Short, Squirrel  is the tenth volume in Ryan North and Derek Charm's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl  monthly superhero comic book. We open with the funeral of Squirrel Girl! That's a dramatic shift in the status quo! Well, it would be if this weren't a superhero comic. Oh, right, so she's alive? Well, a woman with a fish head and in indomitable spirit shows up to the funeral calling herself Bass Lass, and insisting that she be allowed to see video evidence of Squirrel Girl's demise. So, then Count Olaf isn't the only character on this blog who wears transparent disguises? No. Anyway, after the funeral, Squirrel Girl and her best friend Nancy visit her old pal Tony Stark (fun fact, the first Squirrel Girl comic was about her rescuing Iron Man from Doctor Doom), to try and figure out just who (or what) was in the coffin at Squirrel Girl's funeral. Eventually, it's revealed t...

More Squirrel Girl? More Squirrel Girl! All right, let's get this over with. You know, if you stopped treating these comic reviews as a chore they'd stop being one. You're not this obnoxiously chipper IRL, are you? Definitely not, but that upbeat attitude is what I love about this comic, as I have previously mentioned. But let's jump right in. Volume 9: Squirrels Fall Like Dominoes , more so than any previous volume of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl , exemplifies the ethos of it's indefatigably optimistic hero. This volume finds Doreen Green (the aforementioned Squirrel Girl) worried about her new friend Sergei Kravinoff (better known as Kraven the Hunter). So along with her friends Nancy Whitehead (Doreen's roommate), Tomas Lara-Perez (Chipmunk Hunk), Ken Shiga (Koi Boi), Brian Drayne (Brain Drain), and Mary (Tomas's girlfriend), she invites him to go to an escape room. Little do they know that Jomo, the proprietor, is actually Mojo II — an obsc...

Wait, math is about more than numbers? So, what's this book's deal? You may be unsurprised to learn that Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas that Shape Our Reality  is an educational book for grown-ups that tries to make mathematical concepts easily accessible to those of us who don't have a background in math. You took AP Calculus BC in high school. For a semester, but this is even more straightforward than that. Rather than trying to teach the reader how to perform complex calculations or solve equations, Orlin presents the reader with real world scenarios and explains the mathematics underpinning them. These practical demonstrations are divided up into five sections that broadly discuss: Mathematical Thinking, Geometry, Probability, Statistics, and Continuous/Discrete variables. Huh, so like a kind of practical guide to mathematical concepts? Yeah, it's not bogged down with a lot of equations (there are some in the endnotes) but instead stri...

I don't want FOP, GODDAMNIT! I'm a Dapper Dan man! Some people like to complain about the inevitable changes that occur when a story is adapted from one medium to another. But let's be honest, sometimes, the less faithful an adaptation is, the more memorable it is. So, in this series I'll be taking a look at adaptations where creators took one look at the source material and said, "FUCK THAT NOISE!" to see how that turned out. Today's Oddaptation: The Odyssey of Homer  (8th Century-ish BCE) by Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore into O Brother, Where Art Thou? dir. Joel Cohen, written by Ethan and Joel Cohen Sing to me, muse, of those quirky writer-directors who transposed an ancient Greek epic they claim never to have read into one of the most quote-able movies ever made. The Original:  Something is rotten in the state of Ithaca. The king, Odysseus, never returned after the Trojan War (which itself took ten years) ended ten years ago. And now 100+...

Don't let Leslie Nielson fool you, this isn't a parody. Some people like to complain about the inevitable changes that occur when a story is adapted from one medium to another. But let's be honest, sometimes, the less faithful an adaptation is, the more memorable it is. So, in this series I'll be taking a look at adaptations where creators took one look at the source material and said, "FUCK THAT NOISE!" to see how that turned out. Today's Oddaptation: The Tempest (1610-ish) by William Shakespeare into Forbidden Planet  (1956) dir. Fred M. Wilcox, screenplay by Cyril Hume, story by Irving Block, and Allen Adler Shakespeare . . . IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!!!!!!!!!! The Original: Okay, let's do this! Alonso is the King of Naples, and 12 years ago he helped his best bud, Antonio, usurp Antonio's brother Prospero as the Duke of Milan. But we don't know that yet. All we know is that they're sailing back to Italy from Alonso's daugher...

I'm still trying to work out the exact mechanics of this collision. Fun cover though. Okay, time to put Hypothetical Reader back in its box for a moment. That's right, plain old essay format review time. Now, I know that pervious instances of this format were both books that I thought were quite good, but I'll be honest: while I enjoyed reading Stupid Love Comedy , it is, in fact, only okay. Let's talk about why. So, Stupid Love Comedy is a Shōjo manga by Syusyusyu Sakurai (disclaimer, I haven't read all that much in the Shōjo genre, so it's possible that people who are fans of that genre may enjoy this more than I did) concerning the relationship between Osamu Hasegawa, a manga editor, and Suzu Sakura, a mangaka. See, Hasegawa used to be an editor at San Cruz,  a Shōnen magazine, who has been reassigned to Shōjo magazine  Daisy  to work with one of their promising new talents. Well, her debut was promising. As it turns out, Sakura-sensei (in addito...

Huh, it's like a textbook about everything for grown-ups who aren't enrolled in a class. So, what's this book's deal? You remember those books from when you were a kid that explain how things work? Of course. So, this book is kinda like that but for grown-ups. It's sort of a wide-ranging guide to the basics of science, technology, art, and philosophy (various philosophical schools are pithily described by their attitudes toward high fives). Oh, and it's also a work of science-fiction. So it's non-fiction and science fiction? Yeah. The subtitle is "A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler." The author,  Ryan North , has an introductory note explaining that he found the text embedded in Pre-Cambrian rock, and that it appears to have been written by one Ryan North, a technical writer from a different timestream. The text itself claims to be a repair manual for an FC3000™rental time machine. Only the thing is, when you open up the s...