What to read this weekend: Preventing an asteroid apocalypse, and Cult of the Lamb’s first arc wraps up

Normally a book described as being largely about a teen love triangle wouldn’t be something I’d reach for, but I decided to give this one a go after reading many glowing reviews, and found myself drawn in by Louise Erdrich’s prose right away. There is a love triangle, yes, but The Mighty Red is about much more than that. It covers a lot of ground, including the struggles of a farming community facing economic recession, land degradation and concerns about the chemicals being used to keep the land productive.

The Mighty Red follows characters Crystal and Kismet, a mother and daughter, and the people in their orbits in rural North Dakota. There is a tragedy that underlies much of the story (and a hint of the supernatural), but there’s a fair amount of humor mixed in too.

Every so often I’ll be minding my own business, just going about my day, when I suddenly remember the terrifying possibility that a small asteroid could someday strike Earth and do unfathomable damage. Mood ruined. This exact scenario is something that scientists have been investigating for decades and devising tactics to prevent. Promisingly, they’ve made some major strides in recent years. In How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense, science journalist Robin George Andrews dives into the ongoing efforts to develop a planetary defense strategy, like asteroid redirection.

The beginning of this book reads like an apocalyptic nightmare, which is to say it’s pretty engrossing. As Andrews moves on from the hypothetical and into reality — the history and the science that the book is all about — he keeps it interesting with a conversational writing style that makes even the jargon feel readable.

Despite being obsessed with Cult of the Lamb, it’s taken me a little while to get around to reading the comics, the first of which was released back in June. I finally snagged issues 1-4 this week, though, after the fourth and final book of this arc was released, and it’s been a lot of fun reading through them. The comics (so far) rehash the game’s already established lore — how the Lamb came to be leading a cult, why they’re fighting the Bishops of The Old Faith, etc — but there’s some new stuff to latch onto even for people who already know the story really well. At least, new to me (did you guys know Clauneck is a duck?).

Running a cult is complicated stuff, as anyone who has played the game can attest, and the comics get into the emotional ins and outs of that burden. It’s just as cute-yet-horrifying as you’d expect a Cult of the Lamb comic to be. Issues 1-4 are being collected in a volume called The First Verse that’s due to come out in December, but you can find them individually at your local comic store or in digital form.