And welcome! Greetings! Salutations!
And welcome to another episode of Wednesday Night Book Club with your host Andy Rice.
That's me, part of Fried Rice Podcast. Let's get fried!
With me as always is AI-generated classical music because I'm here alone.
Last week we discussed very briefly more of just a pilot episode of the novel Mad...
Rose Madder. I almost said Mad Hatter. But Rose Madder.
Which I don't know if I mentioned last time, but that's a color.
Rose Madder. It's like a type of pinkish red.
And I really like that. I like learning that there's a color called Rose Madder.
And I don't understand why it's called Rose Madder.
Like I know that we have a color Rose, so maybe this is just the more aggressive version of it.
Sorry about that.
But just like everything in life, I like to get high before doing whatever it is I'm going to do.
So, last week was Rose Matter. This week, the book that I read, and I'm going to say that again,
I read it even though I listened to it on audiobook. Again, come at me bros if you think that that's not the same thing.
If you think that somehow using your eyes as opposed to your ears somehow makes you a better person when it comes to consuming literature.
You know what? Come at me.
And I'll have a toe-to-toe debate with you on any book that we both consume at the same time.
You come at me.
The only thing that you would have on me is that you'd be able to tell me how things like names are spelled in a way that maybe I wouldn't,
but I'll be able to tell you how they're pronounced.
Okay. Let's go back to Harry Potter for a moment when you were a kid.
Who knew how to say Hermione's name? No one. No one fucking knew how to say it.
In my mind, I read those books and I thought, okay, here's H named girl with curly brown hair.
Because I knew her name wasn't Hermone or whatever, whichever I, however I thought.
To say it back in the day.
And so, yeah. So reading, yeah, you'd be able to write her name down, but like, audiobook would tell you, oh, Hermione.
And you'd be like, oh shit, yeah, okay, that's a weird name, but at least I know how to say it.
You had to wait till the movies, motherfuckers.
But so did I, because I don't think they had audiobooks for Harry Potter at the time when I was reading them.
And to be honest, I wasn't really into audiobooks back in the day, because I just preferred to read, I guess.
And I wasn't driving around and I didn't have as much kind of idle time to spend listening.
So I do understand that there are benefits to both.
You know, like listening to an audiobook while driving through traffic, there's something, there's almost nothing better.
Because it's like watching a movie in your head to just kill the time.
But trying to tire yourself at the end of the night, you know, get a book and have your eyes kind of do the repetitive motion of going back and forth and reading the lines and having that information in your head.
That's also great, because, you know, it helps you fall asleep and put some cool images in your head before you go to sleep.
So I'm assuming your dreams are pretty cool.
At least I always try to, at night, trick my brain into having cool dreams, and I don't think it ever works.
So like I'll deliberately watch like a cutscene from Final Fantasy, like a Final Fantasy game, 9, 8, 10, whatever.
Just one of the older ones, I'll watch the cutscene and I'll try to, you know, put myself in those situations.
Because it's like I would want nothing more.
If you want to talk about dream place I'd want to live would be like in a Final Fantasy world.
Because you don't have to fight monsters if you don't want.
I think I would maybe.
There's ways to bring people back from the dead, if Phoenix down.
So like that's pretty cool.
You have potions that just heal you.
So like, oh, you're shit, you're all fucked up.
Here's a potion, right?
You're done, you're healed.
And you know what?
That's a discussion for a completely different series that I'm working on.
It has to do with video games, obviously.
So you know what, let's just move past this and actually talk about the completely unrelated to anything I've been talking about so far book that we're watching, that we read this week.
And it's Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff 2016.
So Lovecraft Country.
It is a story about a black family in the 50s.
And, you know, Jim, just that I think Jim Crow era laws were just ending.
And this is like just pre civil rights, you know, so like it's that in between time.
I think there were still Jim Crow laws, obviously, in the south.
We see that throughout here.
But as you know, in the north, it wasn't, you know, it was more accepting.
And you follow them on a Twilight Zone esque science fiction horror HP Lovecraft inspired adventure, which I could just not get enough of.
So if you're familiar with the TV show, which I think probably more people have seen the TV show than read the book, I would imagine.
And there are pros and cons to the TV show, I think, and to the book, which I'll get into.
And I'll try not to keep this too long.
Again, these are just I read a lot and I want to get these thoughts down more for my own records, if anything, because like I go back to I look at these books that I've read and I try to think how do I get like vague vibes on how I felt about them.
But like I want to, you know, just for my own knowledge, be able to come back and see what I felt about these things.
So the novel Lovecraft Country, let's just get into it. Atticus Turner, his dad Montrose, his uncle George Berry, his wife, Hippolta Berry.
Then we have Letitia and Ruby Dandridge.
They are neighbors of Atticus and Ruby is their sisters.
And then you have Samuel and Caleb Braithwaite, who are the antagonists of the of the whole thing.
So Atticus Turner in the show is played by Jonathan Majors.
So that's a problem because he got canceled recently and the actor who played Montrose Turner passed away.
So they did. He did write it.
Matt Ruff did write a sequel to Lovecraft Country, which I just started last night called Destroyer of Worlds or Destroyer of Worlds.
And so far, the beginning is epic.
It's like a flashback of a slave escaping a plantation in a very cool kind of brutal way, which I liked a lot.
And I think it's going to follow more of the well, I mean, obviously, it's going to follow more Turner's because he which is Atticus and Montrose his last name.
So this must be their their ancestor.
And so the I haven't really got into it yet, but the chances of us getting a TV show based on Destroyer of Worlds low.
If it unless they're going to just recast, they'd have to just recast the whole thing.
So if they did that, sure. But anyway, this book sort of feels like a TV show in a way.
Each chapter is a connected yet separate story following its own character doing its own thing.
It's not like Atticus is really only the he's like the main through line.
And he's kind of the main character in the first one in the first part of the chapter called Lovecraft Country.
And after that, it gets into each character has their own journey.
And I and I would even say Atticus isn't even my favorite character in here, which we'll get to.
So Lovecraft Country, it opens up with Atticus trying to make his way to he gets to Chicago.
And then he he he takes his uncle George and then unbeknowingly he takes or he also takes Leticia and they go to try to go to Ardham,
which is a place of they get a mysterious letter from from Montrose Atticus is dead and they have to go to Ardham.
And unfortunately, here's the thing. I never I haven't read the H.P. Lovecraft books yet.
And I feel like I need to. I found on Audible they have the complete H.P. Lovecraft collection.
And it's I think 51 hours long, which is pretty, pretty hefty.
And with Audible, which I love, is that no matter the length or collection, like if they put something into one book, you can buy it for one credit.
So if you're on Audible, here's a trick.
If you so credit costs about eleven dollars last time I checked and you have to be you get three a month or you get one a month.
I think you get one a month and you you could buy more, though.
And I think you buy three at a time. That's what I'm thinking.
That's what I'm thinking about, because I'll you know, I'll buy probably three, you know, three a month.
Right. And so when you but you want to spend your credits wisely because there's books out there that are, you know, 40, 50 hours long and their collections and you get a lot more bang for your buck that way.
If you find a book that's on sale that you really want to read for like six bucks, just buy the book as opposed to spending a credit because your credit is worth eleven.
So anything above eleven is worth spending a credit on.
And there's a lot of books that are over eleven on there.
So it's pretty, you know, like that's just my way of thinking.
Do your own thing.
Support who you want to support, whatever.
So he picks up George and then George tells him about.
So they have George runs the Safe Negro Guide, which is a traveling guide for.
I don't want to say Negroes the whole time because they say it all the time in the book.
And I know that's that's how they refer to back in the day.
And I don't want to just keep saying black people or African Americans.
I don't even know what to say here. So I just man.
This is not again, of course, the first book I choose was Rose Matter and domestic abuse, which I know nothing about.
And now I pick Lovecraft Country about racial tensions in the south.
Again, I'm a fucking expert over here. Right.
So maybe I should pick a book next time that I'll just pick a book about a fat guy that lives alone and thinks he can he can start a podcast and that no one's ever going to listen to.
If I can find that book, then I'll I'll be able to tap into something.
But so his uncle's telling him this this story about this guy that he knows who's doing some work for the Safe Negro Guide.
And he's making his way to Chicago.
Maybe I know that they're on the way to Chicago.
Whatever he's making his way somewhere and he's in the south and he's about to get to a town and he's like, I got it.
I got to take a piss. I can't stop in this town because though I know it's going to happen.
They're going to tell me no. And it might get worse from there.
So he finds like a little forested area, which we've all done, you know, and he goes and he urinates.
And when he gets back, he didn't hear that a police car had pulled up behind him.
There's a police deputy there, obviously a racist one, doesn't know why black guys here even says to him.
He goes like, why? So you decided it. Where are you from? Right.
Oh, you decided to drive 100 miles out into my woods to take a piss. Right.
And so then he tells him about what I had never heard about.
And I don't know if that's a critique on the on the education system.
But like this was never talked about.
But if we're just going to be for just one moment, if we I'm just going to cut myself off for a second.
The amount of knowledge that I received about how poorly black people were treated.
Like and the amount of atrocities that happened to them, we only got skin surface of that in school.
Like in my mind, I was like, yeah, it's bad. We treated them poor.
Like, and I say we, but I'm just saying like Americans at the time, white Americans at the time treated them poorly, like really, really badly, like subhuman like animals.
They they they would lynch them and, you know, whatever. Right.
Like it was like a whole bunch of horrible things.
But I didn't know just how bad it was because I had never known until watching the the Watchmen TV show opening that there was the Tulsa Wall Street massacre.
And that's when black people had their own Wall Street on in Tulsa that was doing great and very successful.
And then you had a bunch of white guys with guns come in and kill indiscriminately and burn it all down.
Right. And why didn't we learn about that? That's that happened in America.
That's one of the most like that's a that's a savage, horrific thing that happened.
That's such a big event that would have been covered right by I would hope all the newspapers in the world.
Right. How we hear about that shit all the time now.
If a group of people were running somewhere, kill everybody and then burn their shit down, we would know about it.
I mean, I know that's modern day and everyone knows everything.
But even back then, that would have been something that would have been reported on, I would hope.
But anyway, I didn't learn about it until freaking the TV show Watchmen.
And then now cut forward to Lovecraft Country, the TV show, which I had seen before.
So, I mean, I've known this now, but it's still what a shocking concept is a sundown city or or a sundown county in this case,
which means that if you catch a black person outside after sundown, that it's OK to lynch them on the spot.
And that is absolutely fucking insane.
And so in the story, this guy, he gets done, you know, taking a piss.
He gets out. He sees the cop and the guy's like, why, you know, why are you doing this?
And he tells the guy, George's employee, the Safe Negro guide, he he tells him, yeah, this is a sundown county.
And you've got about seven minutes by my watch till sundown.
And the guy said, well, I'll get out of here real quick.
I'll just not if you're going south or not.
And then so the guy has he literally in six minutes, he has to go just under the speed limit so he doesn't get pulled over.
And he's it's the most nerve wracking like situation.
You have the cop just tail, you know, just tail him. Right.
You have this guy just going just under the speed limit.
He just breaks out of the county line right as the sun is setting. Six minutes.
The cop gets out of the car, stops his car, gets out, pulls his gun out and just starts firing at the car.
Doesn't kill the dude. But like, of course, he just starts firing at the car.
Like, that's just the sadistic kind of nature of all that.
Sickened me, fascinated me. I don't know if it's a weird, you know, feeling or it's just like this really actually happened.
We had people so cruel, so fucked up that they that they would want to just kill a guy that they found.
It's like, what? How do you even breed that amount of hate into somebody? How does how does that even happen?
I mean, what am I? I'm not going to solve racism. I'm just a fucking like I said, fact, I do the podcast.
Let's so they anyway, that's just a as George and Atticus and Leticia are traveling to Artem,
which, again, sorry, they got a letter that Montrose, Atticus is dead and Atticus had just gotten out of the army.
So he hasn't seen his he just got out. He's heading back. He got a letter. His dad's in some place called Artem.
He misreads it as Arkham, which at first I was thinking Batman.
But I'm now I'm thinking the Batman writers just named Arkham Asylum after H.P. Lovecraft, something or other.
So which I still don't know what Arkham is because I haven't read H.P. Lovecraft.
But maybe there will be an episode down the line where I cover Destroyer of Worlds and the entire H.P. Lovecraft collection.
That'll be a long episode. So just prep for that one.
And I will preface it all by telling you how much I love audiobooks.
So Atticus and Leticia and George are heading to Artem and they pass through this this town.
So they're checking the Safe Negro Guide and there's a diner in this little town that's friendly to black people.
And so they're pulling up and they notice that the it's a different name for the building.
But he's like, hey, you know, maybe they just changed the name.
They're still being cautious. They go inside.
It's a white guy at the counter, a guy at or and there's a white guy behind the counter and the white guy at the counter slams his fist down when he sees him, gives him a dirty look and leaves.
They're starting to get an uncomfortable feeling.
They I think they order some food or whatever.
But then they notice that as they're sitting down again, something I had to learn through a book.
But they're talking about George asks Atticus, do you know why the White House is white?
And Atticus says, of course, it's after the I'm going to butcher this.
But after some sort of engagement, the White House like burnt down.
I don't know if it burnt down all the way, but it definitely burned.
And so they had slaves repaint the entire house white.
And as they're sitting there, they notice that the place they're sitting in is a freshly painted restaurant, which means that the and then like I'm and I'm thinking like, oh, and then when it hits you where you're just like, oh, shit, that means that the friendly to black people owners of that restaurant had their place burned down.
And then now it's in the hands of somebody else. Then they look outside and there's a firetruck full of angry residents, white guys, and they are now in a chase.
And so they get out of there.
They make the she Leticia does something.
I can't remember. She does a distraction. And then they all escape. And as they get to Artem.
Well, that's when things okay. So then then they get to Artem.
And that's when you find okay. So the whole crux of this Lovecraft country, the whole like plot of it is that there's a family called the Braithwites.
They are mon they're sorcerers, alchemists, whoever, however, they want to describe themselves in natural philosophers, you know, however they decide that they want to refer to themselves as but they are a society of men.
The two of them plus a society of men the order of the ancient dawn are they do have powers to some extent. And what I like about this book is that the powers that they have are not too extreme.
They they're cool and they and they're in there, you know, fantastical and but they're not like, like no one's just flying around those just like doing super powered shit like one of them has immunity.
So he's using like ancient that the atom, the, they say this word 1000 times why can't I think of a bit Adam language, the man there's a different word for it.
Anyway, the language of Adam ancient Adam language, and he has those symbols on so he's basically immortal slash invincible.
I think people but what makes him invincible which I like isn't that you can riddle him with bullets and he and it won't affect him.
It's that you're no matter who you are what you're trying to do you will never be compelled to hurt him.
So you'd never be able to pull the trigger you wouldn't be able to raise the gun or hit him or whatever right it's like a cool.
It's a different type of immunity which I, which I like.
You find out that Atticus is the descendant of a slave of an escaped slave who left right as the one of the founders of the order of ancient dawn one of the bigger sorcerer guys was trying to do this ritual and ended up blowing everybody up.
And so she got out of there, pregnant with that dude's probably rape child, because, you know, I know slave willingly go sleep with the master right like that's a.
That's definitely a rape, which they don't discuss but
they find out that Atticus is a descendant, a direct descendant, and so they captures dad just to, you know, lure him out here.
And when he gets out there. He, they stupidly leave a book of all the rules of the order of the agent on, and I think that that was a racist.
I think that that was an underestimation because I believe that they probably thought, maybe these dudes couldn't read, or that they wouldn't be interested in reading. And that was a that was a slight, unless I'm thinking about it, Caleb Braithwaite, the son left that book on purpose, which could have also been the case because there's a lot of twisty twisty stuff going on, but
And so dad, he wants to use Atticus in a ritual that will give him unlimited power to beg.
And so there's a baller move, just the best, like one of the coolest parts, and that's when Atticus is in the room, like the dining room with all of the order of the ancient don't at least that chapter whatever all these like rich important powerful white men, and he.
And all the stuff, and he gets up, and he goes, My name is Atticus Turner. And if I'm not mistaken, I'm, you know, like he says, I'm an ancestor, I'm a of the, of the guy.
Who's the guy.
It was.
I don't know the not Braithwaite but the other dude that was that was the main the main source of the weather gun blew himself up doesn't matter.
He, if I'm a and if I'm a descendant that means that I'm the highest ranking person in here, which means that you all have to listen to me so I want all of you to get up right now leave your food and just go.
And it's like a moment. They get up, and they leave, and he just, I mean the balls and the amount of like, just fuck you for Maddicus Turner and that point was so cool, because he knew he was right, but he wasn't 100% and it could have backfired.
But he did it.
And he kicked ass at it and
he loved him for that. So, the one that doesn't leave is a young man, and that's Caleb right white, and that is Samuel's son, who's very important coming up. So, he changes.
Atticus changes something and so when they do the.
The ritual, it ends up backfiring and and killing everybody and burning the place down, except for Atticus, and they had warned all the help so they like the staff, so like the staff got out and leticia and George, oh and they rescued Montos, Montos from from down in a cellar, whatever
that's, I mean that's like side stuff, and then they escape, and they all go back to Chicago, and that ends the first kind of like Lovecraft country and I thought it was great I thought it was very cool, and it sets up this, this, that's more I think of the HP Lovecraftian version of it all I'm assuming
again I haven't read it.
But, yeah.
Then we get into kind of the ghost story, which is, which is fun it reminds me of the episode of Angel, when Cordelia moves into her new apartment, and she meets her poltergeist roommate who scares her in the beginning, but then moving forward throughout the seasons, they become buddies, and he kind of helps her out in certain situations
and it's great, although the ramifications of that which I think are still probably present in this is that, that ghost, I mean he's probably watching you shower and stuff, right, like if you bring someone over if Cordelia ever brought over a man and and started smashing which I'm sure she did.
You know that ghost was there, like,
why would he not watch, I guess if you're a ghost and you don't have a lot of things to do. Also if you were a poltergeist, and if you could physically adjust things around the world, could you technically play some video games or watch TV because if that's the case, being a poltergeist is not the worst way to spend an afterlife.
If you can just kind of, I mean I know that I'm following this up by saying how pervy he is that he looks at people and shower and that's not why I'm saying it more, let's just forget that I said that, let's maybe I edit that out later, but let's just say that I'm mainly focusing on the video game part, but that would be fun, right, if,
whatever, I don't, anyway, so Letitia is looking to buy a, she gets an inheritance from her mother and she decides to use it.
She wants to buy a house to rent out and so she gets this crazy deal from this shady-esque sort of realtor guy, this white guy who says he'll help her out.
And she buys this very cool in a white neighborhood big house, it's 14 bedrooms and it's called the Winthrop House and that's named after Hiram Winthrop who is her live-in ghost.
So she has to kind of deal with the ghost for a little bit, right, and they, but, and that's just, I mean it's just like a back and forth, it's cool, you get like the relationship between her and Ruby a little bit, Ruby doesn't want to mess around,
like Ruby's pissed that she spent the inheritance on a house and didn't tell her and then she's like, oh you bought a fucking haunted house, really? And so Ruby doesn't really want to have anything to do with this house and Ruby's just like in a space in her head where she doesn't know what she wants to do with life.
And so Letitia though on the other hand is like, no I want to fucking start this house, I want to, I want to have people live in here, but this is where we see the nasty side of moving into a white neighborhood which is, it was very difficult to do as a black person at the time, right?
It was impossible without people doing the things that happen here which is throwing bricks through windows or trying to, and then fucking up the car that was outside their house.
So they throw this big party and they bring over a bunch of big dudes to park the car, get out, make sure that people know that they're these big dudes and then leave the car out in front to make sure that they knew that they were still there.
Some like cool tricks but then they start harassing her and then they throw manure, like they show up and they throw a bunch of shit at her house.
But then when these three little, these three young dudes, they break in to try to burn the place down and the ghost, the ghost like fucks them up and puts them all in the basement.
So her and the ghost and Letitia end up becoming like friends, so almost exactly like the Cordelia thing, but like they end up becoming, they work together, so it's like they're, they both understand that, and I think she threatens him at some point to be, if she's like if you kill me I'm going to be a ghost and I'm going to haunt you, so like deal with it.
So anyway, they become friends and that's that chapter. It's fine, it's not my favorite, but it does set up the house which is important because that's like where they all, because up in the, up in the like the, one of the rooms there's a, oh god what's it called, a, shit.
It's called a Arbor, Arboretum? No, that's, sounds like a burrito from Taco Bell.
Shit, anyway they find this, this, oh I'm such an idiot.
It's a 3D representation of our solar system that spins around on its own with all the planets, you know, so whatever that is called, they find one of those in the, like the, one of the floors, one of the rooms of the Wintham house, and it fascinates Horace who is
Hippolyta's son and Hippolyta herself, and they, I don't know if they find a key right now, but yeah I think they find a key, two keys that Hippolyta holds onto when they're like looking at it, which, so, but they, oh yeah yeah yeah, so Caleb Braithwaite then
he's back in the story, he blackmails the Montrose and his brother, and they have to break into a museum to steal a book, and the book is hidden in this really cool booby trap that they figure out using their, like being clever about it, so it's like suspended in this like zero gravity kind of chamber and they, they don't lose anyone, thankfully.
They're able to pull the guy back because they worked as a team, whereas a pose, like I think there's a dead person in there that tried to do it on his own, but they realize that like, if you, if you are trying to hide something there, you're going to be able to want to come back and get it, so there's got to be like a switch to turn this thing off, and so they found the switch and they turned it off, and they go, they get the books, and they think that they're trying to be secret about it by doing it the day before.
They were supposed to do it so that that way they could switch the book out and give Caleb a different book and not the book of names, which is this crazy powerful book that they just found.
But the reason they're even, the blackmail behind it all is that Caleb stole their, Abdullah's book, which is this, then you find out about Abdullah who was the ancestor of George and Montrose, and she escaped slavery, I think like slavery ended, and so she then went about, I think it took her 15 years or so, but she then started writing
down, because she has a photographic memory, every job and every act of punishment against her, and she added up the total. I think she charged $12 a day for her labor, and then like $20 every time someone whipped her, or $30 or whatever, and she, it was all calculated on whatever, and she would, each year the family would get together,
after she passed, they would get together and recalculate the interest to see what it would be worth today, or today and there today, so the 50s.
Which, I mean, I love that concept, and like I wonder if there really are any families out there that have done something like that, that would be interesting to know, and like to see if they ever got reparations for that, because I know that people feel differently about all these sorts of things, but if a family, even 200 years ago, used slave labor to make their family have
generational wealth over the next 200 years, and now we have rich 1% people that have directly benefited from that, then shouldn't the slaves that were there and did the work for it, shouldn't they get a portion of that? Their descendants get a portion of that, because it's like,
I understand that people say, well, why do they deserve our money? Like that, oh, I don't understand that, I'm just saying that's stupid, like, because it's not, the generational wealth part of it is like, it's not really your money, it's money passed down from people that you're related to 200 years ago, but it's, but they, you know, they also, it's, they didn't do the work for it.
If that happened today, it would be a moral outrage, people would be like, no, absolutely not, you don't get this money, maybe you didn't work for it, you know, you took slaves and you forced people against their will to make this shit.
Anyway, again, fuck, I'm not gonna cure racism, I'm not even, why am I even, let's just move on, but I do think the idea of it is interesting, I would like to know if there's things like that out there. So, after they leave with the, so they leave the secret room at the museum, they have the actual book of names, and Caleb is there because the detectives were thinking that these two dudes were gonna, that these guys were gonna fuck them over,
which, I mean, which they were, but, you know, for good reasons, and they take the book, and the guys get out lucky without having to, I guess, get arrested or get killed, which could have been, could have been something, could have been a real thing that happened because they, of course, just, I guess people back then just really enjoyed killing people, just killing black people.
And again, this is a book, it's a drama, it's a fictionalized version of events, so none of these people really existed, but at the same time, there's no way that this isn't a pretty realistic depiction of probably some events that happened back then.
This probably wasn't an everyday thing, but I can't imagine that this stuff didn't happen. Maybe they're like the, when Latisha tried moving into a white neighborhood, that shit probably happened every day, and the sundown county, holy fucking shit, I didn't even know that existed, but anyway.
Then we get to the one part of the book where I'm, this is, I'm gonna say con, like pro-con, because it's my favorite chapter, but I feel like the TV show did it better, and that doesn't happen very often for me, where I think a movie or a TV show does better than the book, because, you know, when you're reading a book, I think, and I have coworkers that I work with that don't read books.
I don't think they've ever read a book, and they ask me why I think books are better than movies, and of course you can say that like building something in your own head, you get more freedom, it's a more realized vision, you know, sometimes, and using your own imagination, I think, is a lot more fun to do, because it makes your brain work a little bit more, to get the same, like, instead of just cutting down on the,
because when you're watching a movie, that takes care of sound and visual, right there, so you don't have, your brain's not working to create those things, it's just working to process them, so, but what I really think the thing that makes, that makes TV shows and movies not as great, is that you don't get to see the thoughts of the characters, right, you don't get their internal monologues.
Like, the reason I like Hunger Games, the book over Hunger Games, the movie, I think, and the only reason I'm using that is because that, I heard about Hunger Games, the movie coming out, back in the day, when the first one came out in theaters, and I found on Kindle Hunger Games, and so I started reading it the night, like the Thursday night before the movie came out, and it's such a fun, quick, like, action-y, action-packed read, that I finished it at like 8 a.m.
I just went all night, I just did an all-nighter on Hunger Games, and I was like, fuck, that was fun, and so I went and saw the 10 a.m. showing of Hunger Games, which was the quickest and most complete version of a, reading a book to watching a movie that I think you can even do, is do a whole all-nighter read a book and then go see a movie,
and I will say that I was watching the movie just thinking, huh, it's really missing something without her thoughts the whole time, where it's just her just kind of quietly going through the fourth, and I understand that's what they're going for, and if you just watch the movie, there's nothing wrong with it, because you're like, oh, she's a hunter, it's all this cool stuff, but having her thoughts really makes a difference, it flushes out her characters.
I think Katniss in the movie is a little cold-hearted and unapproachable and unlikable, but I think in the book, there's reasons for that, and she's not even that unlikable, like she doesn't come off as unlikable in the book, because you see the reasonings behind her actions, and so we get to, after for some reason a Hunger Games tangent,
we get to, Hippolta disturbs the universe, which is absolutely a phenomenal, just very cool thing, so Hippolta, George's wife, she has not been a major character in this book so far.
She's just kind of, in the show I believe she's kind of like an overweight, middle-aged, just woman, just black woman, and nothing's like special, you wouldn't think like, oh, in this show is she going to do anything, or even in this book, but she likes to travel, and she's a contributor to the Safe Negro Guide,
and she really, even later on in the book she says, you know George, you know how I get, I just want to get in my car, and I just want to drive, and I just want to get out there and explore, which I get, that's so cool.
So she has these two keys that she found in that solar system map, 3D map, and it has an address on it, and it's an observatory, and she does like this flashback where she was a little girl, and she's always been fascinated with space,
and they were announcing that they had found Planet X, which her and her father had been looking for ever since she was like a kid, ever since they discussed the idea of there being a Planet X, her and her dad would go look for it with their telescope.
She, when they announced that Planet X has been discovered, she gets a stat, like she's a little bummed because she didn't find it of course, but you know, what were the odds, so, but then she goes, maybe I can name it.
So she went through all the names and she discovers the best one would be Pluto because of, and it makes sense in the book, he explains the god Pluto versus, she had like two gods lined up, and I think she went with Pluto, and so she wrote it down, she sent it in the mail to the observatory that was dealing with this.
A few months later or weeks or whatever, there's a newspaper and they're saying that the planet is now called Pluto, and she heart, like it's, you know, elated, but then she sees that it's a different girl, some girl that lives in England, and the only reason that the little girl in England got it was because her family was rich enough to afford a telegraph,
as opposed to her young, Hippolyta, having to go to the school, you know, get one of their envelopes and put it into the mail service, so it just got there too late, and it's just kind of heartbreaking and sad, and not necessarily, you know, I mean that's just the disparage of wealth between, you know, I guess, whites and blacks, but like that,
that's just like, that would hurt my heart a little bit, it was really sad, so cut to her as like a young woman in college, and she kind of breaks into this observatory, which is cool, she reminds me of a friend that I have named Michelle, who is one of those like rule breakers,
where like, she'll go places she's not allowed, and then sweet talk her way into letting them keep her there, and that's exactly what Hippolyta does, she goes to this observatory, and she just sweet talks herself to this like cute white boy who lets her in, and he lets her look through the telescope, and it's amazing,
so she makes it an effort to, anytime she comes across an observatory, out on her travels for the Safe New York Guide or whatever, she tries to like break in, I'm using quotes here, break in, she doesn't really break in, she goes and she knocks on the door and she asks, can I look, and then they, sometimes people will quiz her on like how much do you know,
and she's super knowledgeable about space, so they'll be like impressed and let her in despite her skin color and all that stuff, and I mean, and you just think, God, if she was just in a different time, if she was like existed today, she would be like, she would be an astronaut, you know, like it would, or like she'd be working for NASA, and it just sucks that she has to like con, you know, quote unquote her way into these, into these places or whatever, charm her way in more,
so she goes to this astronomical observatory that was owned by Hiram Winthrop, the house owner, who was one of the ancient, the dawn of the ancient, order of the ancient dawn guys, and he, so she goes in, she sneaks back to the guards, past the guard shack, and she goes up there,
and she sees this telescope, I guess, but it's not, it doesn't like go out and just like, it doesn't show anything, there's no opening for the, for the telescope to move around or do anything, right, so she sees this group of numbers, and she starts, she types in, like I think one or two or whatever, and it opens a doorway to another dimension, another planet, right,
and she starts typing in numbers kind of indiscriminately, looking through the hole, seeing all of these different places, and she's fascinated by it, and she eventually, she, she says that she looks in the back of the book and uses the answer key, which I think is she had numbers that she had written down, or that had been written down,
so she just types those numbers in, and it opens up on this beach and this planet, and so she steps out, because, and it, I mean, and I love that when she's going through, she puts her finger through, but it's kind of like painful and resistance, and then she realizes that you can't do this in half measures, if you're going to go through, you have to go through, so she steps through very bravely, very cool,
and now she's in this like beach area, and she looks up, and there's a cottage, like a gated, like, like place with stairs leading up there, and she, and like, whoa, what are the chances that on this different dimension there's a thing, so she goes up there, and she meets a woman named, oh god, it wasn't Pearl, well Ida,
she meets a woman named Ida who tells her the tragic story about how she ended up there, which was that, that Winthrop, to punish her,
like her, her son, or sorry, her daughter Pearl, her son, her daughter Pearl eloped with Winthrop's son, which was an interracial marriage at the time,
and in order to punish Ida and the other employees, he puts them in a completely different dimension, in this little house that gives them, basically has a Star Trek replicator type thing where you just type in a number and it gives you this bag of food that could be ranging from something decent-ish to absolute foul,
like bugs, like larva coming out or whatever, grubs that you'd have to eat, and the punishment was that they're putting, like Winthrop put them there so that they would never see anyone ever again, it's like, this is a fate worse than death, because you're going to be all the way out here by yourselves with no one else,
and eventually the other ones die and now it's just Ida, and so Ida helps Hippolta escape, and when, oh, and then when Ida, when Hippolta asks Ida to come with her, like Ida's, Hipp, Ida's like, no, like this is like kind of her home now,
she doesn't want anyone to know her location because she doesn't want anyone to be able to find Pearl, but then later on you find out that Pearl and her husband died in a racist fire, which, wait, no, am I wrong here?
I believe, yeah, they're the ones that died, they're the ones that got, when we get to that chapter, but anyway, okay, so Hippolta comes back and she, but she leaves her comic book on the ground, the one that her son writes, her artist son Horace writes these comic books,
and she accidentally leaves it as she's leaving because these white guys find her and then they end up dying through various means, and so that's the end of that, but the reason I like the TV show better in this particular situation is the episode is called I Am in the show,
and it is crazy how much like, so she actually, so in the book, she only, like she looks through the door and she sees these different portals, but in the show she walks through them, and she meets these,
like she learns all this stuff, she sees all these things, it's been a while since I've, it's been a while since I've watched it, and I'm gonna probably watch the show, or at least this episode again, but she becomes like an Amazon,
she like discovers who she is in a way that's crazy, like she almost gets like access to unlimited knowledge, like the universe opens up in this infinite way in front of her, and she like understands it, like of all the characters that could have went through there,
like Atticus wouldn't have gotten the same, Horace might have gotten some sort of revelation, but her being the one that could understand it, being the smartest one there, she like really, like I've watched this, this episode of television, I Am,
of Lovecraft Country, might be my favorite television episode of just any series, and I'm putting a lot of them up there, there's, you know, you have the Once More Feeling Buffy episode, you have the musical episode from Psych,
I know those are both musical episodes, that's not gonna be a theme, but you know, there's some Breaking Bad episodes that are pretty up there, you know, but something about I Am, this episode, it's just, it hits me, it reminded, you know what it was, and maybe it won't hit me the same, because I've seen everything everywhere all at once,
but this was the prototype to everything everywhere all at once, I feel, like this walked, or this ran so everything everywhere could fly, because that is one of my favorite movies that I've seen in a long time, one of the most impactful, just kind of like gets you in the feels,
and it's just exciting to watch kind of movies, loved it, but I Am, I feel like is even more, it's like less silly than everything, so it feels more grounded, it feels more real, and she like learns a lot of stuff,
it's just, it's so good, so like even if you don't want to watch a whole series on this, which I think you should, don't just skip to episode seven, there's only 10 episodes, so like just watch it, it's a great series, it's what got me to read this book actually,
I did, I've never even heard about this book, and I watched the show, and then when I finished the show, I had to read it, and I'm glad that they're different, they're so different, the book and the show, like, I even think they say that the show is inspired by the novel, right, there's episodes that don't exist,
there's storylines that don't exist in the book that are in here, because the novel is only a handful of chapters, one, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, so there's at least two more episodes, and some of these chapters are very like quick, so I would imagine that they contain, that they sort of doubled them up, doubled up on some of them,
so then we get into the next chapter, Jekyll and Hyde Park, and that is a great title, I'm always a fan of great titles, and that one is so good, so Ruby, we haven't really checked in with her much, she runs into Caleb Braithwaite,
as she's making her way to Letitia's party, but because Letitia's house is haunted, she doesn't really want to be there, so she ends up like, kind of just absconding with Caleb, but she doesn't know who Caleb is, she's never met this guy, he's just kind of a cute white guy who is into her a little bit, it feels like, and so he takes her out at a good time,
and then he makes her a proposal, and she decides to, she agrees to it, and then she wakes up the next morning as a white woman, and it takes her a while to get, like to get used to it, because it scares the shit out of her, she didn't know what she was signing up for,
but once she adjusts to it, she starts to get addicted to it a little bit, like, because the way she's treated out in public, like by people, is different, one of the first encounters is she goes to the store of this woman who rejected to hiring her,
and she sees that the woman is there, and so she puts a scarf in that woman's purse, and then tells the police that she stole, stole it or whatever, and they, like, believe her instantly, because she's a white woman, an attractive white woman, with red hair,
and she starts, so she starts using, so she starts working for Caleb, and they come up with this whole thing where she lives in this house, and she's both the maid and the occupant of the house, so she's Hillary, she calls herself Hillary Everest at first, because Hillary is the man who climbed Mount Everest,
and she has always wanted to be a sherpa, it's always been kind of a dream job, because she thought, well, why wouldn't you want to work a job where you get to look at those views every day, and later she changes her name to Hillary Hyde, to kind of, because it is sort of her bad persona in a way,
so she has to go to this meeting where you see all the different, like, the different lodges of the Order of the Ancient Dawn, and they are all meeting up, and that's when Caleb comes out and says that they should all join forces, that, like, hey, we're all doing our own things, we're keeping secrets from each other,
it's time that we just pooled our resources and started something bigger than us, and, like, you know, and then, but I think I should probably be the one to run it, is kind of what he's doing.
So, later, Ruby goes down into the basement, and she discovers that the white woman that she keeps turning into is down there, in a, being, like, frozen, you know, like, kept alive, and she is being used her blood to make that potion that Ruby keeps taking,
and there's, like, a lot of that potion in there, so she, yeah, it's like she stays, though, like, she likes it too much, I guess, and she stays, and that's, I mean, like, she's just, so, Ruby's kind of a, does that make her a flawed character?
So, I was thinking about, like, Ruby's probably the most unlikable one in the group, and I think she's written that way, but why? I don't think that she is wrong for not wanting to stay in an actual haunted home, like, if you're legit afraid of ghosts that actually exist, then, yeah, I don't see, like, that's a problem,
and, yeah, I would imagine that if you found a potion that turned you into somebody that the general public views as equal, as opposed to sub-equal, then, like, why not, I mean, but it does, it does change, you know, like, is it a betrayal of being black, or is it, like, a cheat code that she shouldn't be using, she should be using?
I don't know, but it's definitely a, I don't know, it's sad, because, like, she knows that she shouldn't like it, but she does.
So, we get then to the next chapter, Narrow House, where, and by the way, moving forward, I'm not going to go chapter by chapter for every book, it's just that this one happens to be built, like, TV shows, like, episodes, so, you know, like, most books can just be thought of as, like, you know, these chunks or whatever, but this kind of does this.
But we get to the Narrow House, which you just find out is about the guy who built that observatory, I think it's his daughter and the guy that she ran off with.
They both were killed, they get burned down to death, and so Montrose, who is sent there by Caleb with Atticus to go find, to go find Henry Winthrop, the son of the guy who built the house, they find out that he died, and they were there to get the notebooks,
and Montrose sits there and he, they, they, like, the ghost tells Montrose, like, his entire story, and Montrose sits there, because he, like, wants, Montrose is like, I want to help my son, like, these people are trying to kill my son, they're using him for this stupid sorcery stuff, you should know you're the son of this guy.
He's talking to the ghost of Henry, or, or, he's talking to the ghost of Henry Winthrop, and the ghost is malevolent at first and violent and accusatory, but then when, when, when Montrose says he wants to save his son, that's when, that's when the ghost shows him what happened, and it's a sad, you know, how they, how they died, how they, they tried to make it, but they died.
And they, across the, there's another address, so they were like 213 West Elm Street, but on 213 East Elm Street, there's a guy, and the neighbors have a sign pointing at his house saying, nigger lover, and because he helped that family out, and so, like, it's this, you see it everywhere, and they get killed, and,
and so, like, Atticus walks in, and Montrose is just sitting there, and he's got these ashen-covered notebooks, so he does find them.
And then we get into, I would say, maybe my, probably my least favorite chapter, I don't know, but Horace, he's a kid, you follow him around, it's him and his buddies talking about different, like, stuff that they've heard happen to different people about, you know, like, hey, don't trust this guy, you know, like, they'll, like, like, racist things that have happened.
Oh, yeah, so, but the main part of it is that the detectives find Horace, and they ask him about his comic book, and when Horace accidentally, unintentionally tells them that his mother had the book, they put a spell on him, because they're part of the order, of, that he can't say anything.
And so he, anytime he does, he gets this, like, he gets sick, he gets this, like, itchy feeling, he just can't, right? And so, he tries, like, he tries to, there's this devil doll that somebody finds, and it tries to attack him.
But, and that's, and that's what, like, I didn't really care, like, there's a devil doll chasing around, it's like, almost feels like Chucky, I guess.
But, Ruby, who Horace has always liked, he is able to, using Scrabble letters, spell out enough that Ruby is able to help, like, Ruby is able to then help, like, piece everything together.
So Ruby goes and tells Caleb, Caleb then helps undo the curse, and now we are in a point where it's Caleb versus Captain Lancaster, who is the guy who runs the Order of the, the Order of the Ancient Dawn.
And now we get to the last, the last chapter, which is, all, all the family gets together, they share what's happened. So I love that that happened, because all of this has been happening kind of behind each other's backs.
So Atticus and Montrose and George and Letitia tell you what happened at the Ardham Lodge, the ghost stuff that happened to Letitia, you know, the breaking in and getting the book, which Hapalta doesn't like, but then, that George went and did that, but then George doesn't like that.
Hapalta went to a different universe, different planet, without telling him. Ruby does not tell them that she's been turning into a white woman. That's, she's ashamed of it, I think, and she doesn't tell them.
And then Montrose tells him about the narrow house, which is the name of the, they changed their name to Narrow, I think, Henry and Pearl. And then Horace tells them about what happened to him, and they all come up with a plan to really come out on top.
And so, oh, one of the things that Caleb did to get the book of names was that he gave them what, Abdullah's book, they were owed like 300 and something thousand dollars.
And so, Caleb just gave them that money, as a, like to pay back their debt, as sort of to like make him seem like a good guy, but I like that Montrose was like, no, you don't come off as a good guy for paying what you owe, you know.
So, that was pretty cool. And the, so everyone gets together, they, Caleb has a plan, Lancaster has a plan, but they get Winthrop's ghost to help them, and they end up,
Lancaster gets lured into a room, he gets swallowed by this like shadow monster thing. And then Atticus changes some letters of that, of that Adam language, and he, so he alters, that's what it is, alters Caleb's thing, his immunity.
And so, they drive, they drive him out, out of state, Caleb, and they go like, hey, so, you don't have immunity anymore, or it's a different kind, you're not allowed to come into these, I'd stay out of these areas, they hand him a safe Negro guide, and they go, I'd stay out of these, out of these areas.
And unless you're, you'll get real sick, and if you try to use magic, and that's the worst part, if you try to use any magic, you're gonna get sick or whatever. And so, he reaches back into his brain, he finds he can't do magic, and he thinks, you know, it's like, why would you do this?
And he's like, it's cruel or whatever, and then they drove away, which I love. So he gets his comeuppance, they buy the house, the Winthrop house, outright, with that $300,000 or some of it, and then they put a safe in their house, and they win.
So, they beat Caleb, none of them die. Ruby, during the final mission, does disguise herself as Hillary, and helps them, and never tells them that that's what she did.
So, as of right now, in the story, if there wasn't right now, because there is a sequel, so there is gonna be more to it, I don't know if they're gonna continue on these threads or not, but as of right now, she might still, because she has full access to an unlimited supply of that potion.
And, or at least a bunch of it, so, and she has that house, so I don't know what's gonna happen with Ruby. So, how did I feel about the book? I really liked it. I think it's got some pretty gruesome parts.
It teaches you a lot about, like, the Jim Crow era south, and just, but in an interesting way that's not just like a history book, you know, where it's just facts.
Like, this is a fictionalized version, so he's allowed to play around with themes and stuff, and since it's based in the supernatural science fiction-y kind of universe, like, it just gives it this eerie backdrop of, you know, the racism is bad enough, but there's also monsters lurking, you know, and it's not just racist.
And so, yeah, I, if I'm gonna, so let's see, what's my rating? I should've thought of this before. If I was gonna give this a rating of, what was a big theme throughout all of this? I don't wanna say out of five racisms, what would I give this?
But, let's see, okay, out of, okay, out of Cthulhu arms, I don't know how many arms Cthulhu has, I'm gonna say there's five Cthulhu arms. So out of five Cthulhu arms, I'm gonna give this a four.
I think it was great, I think it's definitely worth a read. I think it's a little short, I think you could've done more with some of the chapters.
But, it's enough to get me super excited, maybe a 4.5, maybe 4.5 Cthulhu arms, if we're gonna be honest, because it really, it was engaging. But the show, it's worth both, worth watching and reading, so, or listening to.
So yeah, oh, let's do next week's movie, because I didn't say that, I didn't say that this time, did I? One second, I'm just gonna pause this.
Okay, so the first, the book I'm gonna be reading next week is brought to you by Austin from Fried Rice Podcast. He recommended that I read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, a book I have not read.
I have read Heinlein's work before, I've read Starship Troopers, which I quite enjoyed, and so this is about, I think, a guy, a Martian moving to Earth with powers and stuff, a little bit of reverse John Carter, it sounds like.
So, it's interesting, it was either that or George Orwell's 1984. So, if you would like to recommend a book for me to read next, we have a, we have a voicemail, I won't answer it, it doesn't even ring, just, if you wanna leave a voicemail, you could,
702-829-0117, again that's 702-829-0117, if you call that number, listen to our fun little Fried Rice Podcast voice recording and leave a, leave what book you wanna read, chances are I'll read it.
I will definitely take requests, so if you wanna hear my thoughts on it, let's do it. This has been Wednesday Night Book Club, let me just get this outro music real quick.
There we go.
So intense, thank you AI.
Jesus Christ, it's so bad.
Alright, well, we'll see you next week, this has been a lot of fun.
Have a good night guys.