Neanderpundit

I have, all my life, tried to find original, unexpurgated books; the readers digest condensed versions usually don’t do it for me.

Yeah, there are some books that are just too fucking long. “Shogun” would be seven pages without the history lesson, “The Stand” would be fifty pages without the cocaine King jammed up his nose while he was writing it.

One of the books most difficult to find undamaged is The Count of Monte Cristo. And there are good reasons; the book has been hacked up to try to sell it to a younger or possibly more repressed audience. You won’t find the drug use, the treachery, the rape and torture in the commonly available versions, and the book loses a great deal of it’s literary validity because of that. Read the kindle version, if you’ve never had a chance to read it unfucked-with, and you’ll agree: What was an awesome book after it had been hacked to pieces is nothing short of monumental in it’s original form.

Oh, and its free.

The Kindle is turning out to be a damned fool time sink.

I have an unusual reading style; because I spend a lot of time re-reading books I have read before in the middle of reading new books.

Currently I’m reading the Strickland stories and “A Study in Scarlet” to compare the detectives of Kipling and Doyle to Michael Connely’s “Harry Bosch”. I also stop doing that from time to time and read twenty or thirty pages of “The Count of Monte Cristo” just because it’s an amazing book.

When I awoke at two, or, more accurately, when my bladder slapped me awake at two, I hopped up and peed, and turned on the light because Edmond Dantes had just saved Monseur Morrel’s firm by paying his debts and restoring the Pharon to the firm. Right there on my nightstand.

I read until I fell asleeep again, at about five.

Then I read some more over breakfast.

The way this little bastard dovetails into my reading style is scary. The fact that a huge number of the books I want to read are available for free is even more scary. I have to be very careful not to take it to work or I’ll be sitting on the crapper reading all night like a UAW drone.

When I fell asleep at five, I had not yet had coffee, and in my decaffeinated, headachey state, I dreamed a feverish dream.

I had been assigned to guard a little stretch of parking lot which acted as the entrance for a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall. A gaggle of sixtysomething broads in their sunday best were determined to get into the hall, but I was guarding it because the parking lot was soft, wet tar, about nine feet deep. For some reason it had to be like that, and it had to cool down for five days.

I explained as nicely as I could to the ladies that the back door was open and they should go around that way They made it clear that they didn’t even THINK the phrase “Back Door”, and asked for suggestions in crossing the tar.

‘Wear distinctive hats” I told them.

In a few minutes, their hats were all that remained, and a wedding party used them as steppingstones to cross to the non-fluid portion of the lot.

I need to get coffee in me sooner.