OMG my mind is blown!!
https://media.tenor.com/tvFWFDXRrmMA...mind-blown.gif

Just finished Plato's Republic. That's one dense read. Very hard to read in small chunks as the dialogues tend to carry on for a bit. It felt funny to read it; it was so challenging that I ended up reading 3 full books while "taking a break" from Republic. Seems like I should say that I didn't like it much and struggled to finish it but in reality, it was a great book that took a bunch of mental energy to try to comprehend.

I’ve read the first three, and almost halfway through the fourth.
The character James Reece is a bad ass that the enemy does not want to piss off.

A little more gory than Reacher.
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Damn.

I thought for sure this would be a cross thread humor bump considering what they're talking about in the "DC" thread.

Have you ever read any Will Jordan novels? He has a whole series starring a character named Ryan Drake. They are making movies out of them now. From my understanding, it's a lot like that Jason Bourne stuff you dig, secclark. But better. This is a guy that knows what time it is. He's on youtube under the name "The Critical Drinker" and from what I can tell, he does drink the Scotch. He's from Scotland though so it's normal there.

For real check out Will Jordan though, you'll love it.

Just finished Quest for the Grail.

Still holds up a thousand years later.

I just wanted to thank you for this recommendation. What a sad, strange, victorious then sad and strange again, saga for a proud people.

The world has always had some heartless MF'ers, and some of these murderers are near the top of the list.

Yeah, for sure **** the murderers. But also **** the mother****ers that were blatantly defrauding them as their guardians or whatever term they used. Jesus Christ. That made me hurt physically.

It's been 30 years since I've read "The Stand". About to dive in again.

Brad you little high brow sweetheart - what are you reading RN?!?!

I've got two going at the same time. Raymond Chandler's "Farewell my Lovely" and James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice" It has one of my favorite lines of all time. "I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church."

Which version do you read? I’m gf loves King so I got her the unabridged version of The Stand. It had a dude with a bullet casing in his mouth on the cover.

She said the shit just meandered for the longest time. It was a slog to get through for her. I felt bad about that.

I just finished Chandler's "Trouble is my Business"--basically four Marlowe novellas. Excellent Noir.

A little trivia for ya, BilOlChiefsfan. Have you ever read the Raymond Chandler novel "The Big Sleep?". I assume you have cause you're a Chandler fan. Did you know that it was adapted for the silver screen by some Mississippian dude that thought he was a writer but needed to pay his mortgage so took that gig? His name was William Faulkner, and he would later win both the Nobel prize for literature as well as multiple Pulitzers. The picture starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a pair that would become iconic in Hollywood.

The same duo starred in the film adaptation of "To Have and Have Not". That novel was written by Ernest Hemingway, but guess who adapted it? Not Hemingway - he wanted too much money. It was William Faulkner himself! Howard Hawkes famously said "Hemingway wants how much? Screw him - Faulkner will do it way cheaper and he's a way better writer anyway!". So Hemingway's main rival took his novel and made it into a movie. Had to have pissed him off.

Faulkner adapted multiple movies and The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not were but a couple.

I think The Big Sleep is good but it feels like an hour got cut out that really needed to be there. There are just so many named characters and a bunch never even show up in the film - you just gotta keep track of what they're doing as you hear about it through dialogue. It's tough for a non-Chandler reader to really figure it all out at first viewing IMO.

While I wait for The Count of Monte Cristo to be delivered, currently scheduled for July 8th, I needed something else to read. So I'm now halfway through Mikhail Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog". It is about a dog that a Russian scientist experiments on by grafting the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased human ruffian onto the dog's groin and brain. The dog ends up transforming into a human, but it's still a dog at heart. Thus, the title "Heart of a Dog". The creature ends up going far in Soviet politics.

It's a wild tale. The world famous one-line "let's have a smoke or I'll give you a poke" comes from this.

It's mostly comedic but operates as a scathing indictment on Marxism as well, which is why it was banned in the Soviet Union for so long, as was basically everything Bulgakov wrote (although Stalin quite liked his stuff, which is why he was never executed, Stalin would still ban it. One time, Bulgakov got so tired of everything he wrote getting banned, that he wrote a play that was strictly about how great Stalin was. He just wanted something to be produced without being banned. That play got immediately banned LOLLL).

Bulgakov was a pretty big time baller. The whole thing checks in at 117 pages so it isn't a huge investment for those with the inclination. It's like Soviet Frankenstein, essentially.