Put this in your bug-out bag

My dad and I have deep love for really, really bad movies — especially those featuring monsters and/or explosions. I bought him How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters: Fight Back When Monsters and Mother Nature Attack for Christmas this year, and he lent it to me once he finished. It’s hysterical, and provided excellent relief from the other book I just finished, which was dark and decidedly not funny.

“NOTE: In the rare situation a megatsunami washes a T. rex into your path, you won’t be carrying a weapon large enough to hurt it. If it’s intent on eating you, it will eat you. However, you will be killed by the coolest dinosaur ever. Most people go their whole lives without ever seeing a T. rex in person. Do you know how lucky you are?”

This book was inspired by SyFy movies like Sharknado, but you won’t need to have seen them in order to enjoy it. Most of the disasters are made up (well, they’re all made up) by Shaffer, rather than featured in movies. Each chapter discusses a specific event or monster, such as arachnoquakes or piranhacondas, in great detail. You’ll learn how they came about, what they cause, and how to survive them. The advice had me cracking up, as did some of the invented names of scientists and other “professionals” attributed to various quotes. It took me only an hour or so to read through, although I often interrupted myself by reading sections aloud to my husband.

Buy this for your dad, then borrow it from him. He’ll love it. I was especially pleased to see that this book also mentioned Stephen Colbert, one of my dad’s favorite humans:

“If the reports of cave bear attacks are proven true, however, our collective fear of bears will have been justified many times over. And one man will be there to say, in a voice saturated with snark, “I told you so.” That man’s name is Stephen Colbert. “Bears are mindless killing machines. They smell our fear. They feed on our weakness. They are public enemy number one,” Colbert has said on his nightly talk show, The Colbert Report. “I believe all God’s creatures have a soul—except bears. Bears are actually Satan’s children.”