Gone Before Goodbye – Reese Witherspoon & Harlan Coben – Episode 133

 

Warning: if you liked this book, you’re probably not going to like this episode. The Buddies spent 45 minutes trashing Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben’s new book collaboration “Gone Before Goodbye”. A book so spectacularly bad that the Buddies are considering picketing Barnes & Noble. This literary dumpster fire had all the hallmarks of a ChatGPT fever dream: nonsensical plot twists, a plastic surgeon performing expert heart surgery, even the clever character names like “Pork Chop” and “Cinderblock” couldn’t save this one. So grab your Thumper 7 artificial heart, practice your most unrealistic dialogue, and join the other Buddies/listeners who can appreciate a good 0.5-star review. Fool us once, Reese – never gonna fool us again.

 

Intro/Book Report (0:00-3:52)

Stock Up/Down (3:53-34:15)

Favorite Scene/Character (34:16-39:46)

Love/Hate (39:47-44:37)

Conclusion (44:38-48:18)

 

NEXT BOOK: The Will of the Many by James Islington

 

Transcript for SEO Purposes 🙂

All right, welcome to Book Club.
I’m Dylan here with Graph Voice, Keith.
What’s up, buddy?
– It’s not beefy, what are we doing?
Beefy?
– You didn’t notice on this book?
Yeah. – We got to it.
Okay, cool, cool.
Well, here’s Book Club, we’re gonna get
out the best sellers.
And this week we’ll be discussing
Gone Before Goodbye, a brand new,
a hot off the presses novel by none other
than Reese Witherspoon and Harland Cobain.
If you’d like to recommend a book
for us to read or to check out
the same past episodes, you can visit our website,
bootableclub.com or sign through our DMs,
Twitter, X, whatever you call it, Instagram.
That’s bootable club podcast is the handle.
You can list to us iTunes,
Spotify or your podcast, download, subscribe,
five star reviews, it’d be great.
I think we actually got a couple on Spotify,
my periodically check, and I was like,
oh, there’s a couple more reviews there.
Please, and thanks, appreciate you.
Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith.
Well, people behind the production curtain here,
we were talking about a different book,
something fantasy related more in our wheelhouse.
And then you threw this book out there
because I had this could be an interesting potential list
in considering our relationship
with Reese Witherspoon Book Club Books
and now she’s writing it.
So, you know, it’s like next level.
Jokingly.
Yeah, You were joking.
I got confused that you said, let’s do it.
And that’s why we read the book.
So, here we are with Gone Before Goodbye.
It’s Reese’s first novel.
She has some children’s books,
which she should probably stick to.
And autobiography or whatever thing she’s got going on there.
And did some photography book or something.
I don’t even know what that is.
But this is her first novel,
and she did it with obviously,
Harlan Cobin, who’s a multi-time bestseller,
and he’s kind of is the man of the thriller franchises,
although I haven’t read any of his books.
This one has a 3.82 on Goodreads.
Before getting to the categories, though,
I think you have a book report prepared for us.
So, if you’d like to stand up in front of the class and present.
We had a long, storied history with Reese Witherspoon.
It all started when we read the last thing he told me,
which one of us, Dylan, said after recommending it
that she is a scam artist in a shell
and that she should be ashamed of herself.
Now, what’s the only way to get back at a scam artist,
D-Man?
That thing to do is buy their book
and put money in their pockets.
So, I was very weary starting this book.
That is until I heard Chris Pine’s dulcet voice
coming through the audiobook to start things off.
I quickly changed my tune.
But quickly, I envied Mark, aka Chris Pine’s character
who was captured by African game,
brutally tortured and killed.
Gone before Goodbye, more like Gone Before the Prologue.
What proceeds?
Was a disjointed, nonsensical, unrealistic jigsaw puzzle.
A jigsaw puzzle where someone would continuously dump new pieces
in one year, like halfway through.
Everything about this book didn’t make sense.
I will say I never knew what was coming next.
I still honestly don’t know what was coming next
or if the story even finished, I might even sure.
But if you want an action book slash,
getting over lost book slash sci-fi somehow,
slash superhero doctor book slash company ethics book slash
world traveler book slash, I don’t know,
whatever you want to add in as an ad-libs here
because there’s every single thing in this.
If you want all those things,
this is the right book for you.
– It’s funny because that was a good book for it, thank you.
I’ll give it a B.
That was the first reading, sorry.
– Yeah, the reading was tough,
but after listening to this book, it was pros.
But it’s funny because you can hate a book
and you can hate it for lots of reasons.
But it seems like the things that you win
are the exact same things that I took out of it
and I’m excited to discuss those because good God.
Good fucking God.
All right, let’s get to some stock up, stock down, Keith.
I’ll start it off so you can have a little breather
after your book report collects yourself.
My first stock up is chatGPT, stock up.
Oh, similar, okay.
– AI is big these days, it’s real big.
The company’s pushing it, they’re like,
oh, you think we can lose 25% of the workforce
if we just go to chatGPT, but I guess it also applies
to writing, you just don’t have to,
you don’t have to write anymore.
Just toss some absurd premise into chatGPT
and this hot pile of diarrhea on the page
will just come right up.
The writing is fucking terrible.
Honestly, my girl Sandra Boydon,
author of the belly button book and move blah, blah, blah,
some of my daughter’s favorite books,
way better writing than this, way better writing
and those are cardboard.
It’s phenomenal how bad the writing is.
I looked up to, you know, I’m doing research,
I take this thing very seriously.
So, you know, interview they had her and Harlan Corbin,
they’re talking about their writing process
and they both said that this isn’t gonna be any sort
of like mail-in situation.
We’re not resting on our reputations here,
one being a good author and the other person
being Reese Witherspoon.
They’re gonna go all in.
That’s like legitimately what they said.
We are all in, we’re going and we’re gonna give it
everything that we have.
This is everything you have.
If you heard of the MJ Flu game,
that’s everything he had.
What is this?
Singing a diarrhea.
Oh my God, what is this book?
So yeah, the writing was terrible.
A chatGPT, not good.
Did you have anything to say about that before?
I have another non-sequender.
– Oh, I had my,
sack up was AI/fembot,
so that’s C3PO,
but mine was a little different.
– Oh, I don’t know if you want me to add into it.
Yeah, sure, We can touch on my thing afterwards.
You already touched on the dialogue
being absolutely fucking awful
’cause a computer may have wrote that.
It was so, so bad.
my first note of All my notes was nobody talks like this.
The conversations?
– My first note of this book was a dialogue is so bad,
it’s not realistic.
Yeah, nobody talks like That to each other.
It just doesn’t happen.
– My second note is,
why is she talking to an imaginary Mark?
‘Cause I assumed it was not real.
I was just like,
there’s a man who sends why this person’s talking like this?
And It was, It was an AI.
Oh Yeah, That was either so thinly veiled
that we were all supposed to know that it was an AI?
Or it was, I mean, who knows?
This book is so bad that they could have been like,
we got ’em and that could have been a twist
because I immediately knew it was an AI, but.
– You can’t introduce a crazy technology
that is not known to this world yet,
that creates an AI mark that somehow can spit off phone
numbers and knows who to trust and not to trust
and you’d have full ink comers.
This isn’t in reality yet.
You can’t just make these things up based off of metadata,
whichever the fuck that means.
They’re just using throwing terms out there.
Unless the whole book is about that.
If you wanna make the whole book,
this is a crazy idea of a thing, fine, that’s fine.
That’s the book about.
Or it’s a sci-fi book where there’s tons of different things
or if it’s just a straight action book
and it’s James Bond and he has some cool gadget.
Yeah, fine, all those things are allowed.
You can’t do a stupid fucking AI dead Mark
and then talking to me about how important is to give
lip surgery to people in Africa and then
tell me the details of heart surgery and should like that.
It’s a real fucking in this world book.
You can’t do both.
– Yeah. – You can’t, demon.
I refuse.
Well, You forgot the best part.
One of the reasons she takes this job with the guy
is to pay off her sister’s mortgage
or something along those lines or sister was in debt
and they paid off her debt.
This is the same sister that created this grief bot
which would be a billion with a billion dollar business
if it existed.
It’s like, oh, we’re still in beta testing.
Yeah, well, once you’re out of beta,
like this thing is you can get an angel investor
to come in and give you a billion dollars right now.
Yeah.
– She’s in debt and so you’re like,
all right, cool, I’m gonna get on a plane and do this surgery.
What?
– You’ll be able to pull it that software,
like what she did was able to come up with all this data.
That right there is a billion dollars.
Let alone the idea of being able to then take all that data
and spit it back out in such a perfect manner.
Yeah, the software That She created
that’s able to pull together all,
yeah, all of his, you know, his high school yearbook quotes
for literally everything this guy’s ever done
and then extrapolate on that to be the one and the same
of what this person is and to remember random people’s phone numbers
that, okay, sure, but they didn’t have his phone.
So, what happened?
Like, I agree with you.
It’s such an outworldly idea.
The idea itself is cool and I’m hip to the idea of the grief bot
but having it being like a fully fleshed thing
that their main character can interact with is observed
because it’s just like you said,
it’s something out of this world
and if the rest of the book is set in this world,
it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s very confusing.
For sure.
– That’s funny because the non-second thing I was gonna say
was how do we feel about the grief bot?
But.
– So it’s pretty good.
But on top of That, I was also thinking
it was funny about the grief bot in that,
imagine if this did come,
like this technology did come around
and we have 130 episodes and it just,
I mean, this is obviously, we’re not like doing a bit
but my grandchild just knows me from this cre,
this grave bot process.
What?
What?
No, none of that.
I’ve done none of that.
– I’m talking about myself.
– Yeah, but it’s weird.
All right, what else do you have for our stock up?
Save your complex stock up.
Listen, if you’re in the military or your doctor,
I think you kind of deserve to have a savior.
Like that’s what you kind of are signing up for.
And I appreciate that her character at least
is both of those things.
But I also think that those two professions
are kind of really numb to reality.
Like for me, if someone came to my house and was trying to rob,
my mind thinks, I’m gonna pull my bad out from my bed
and I’m gonna go down there and make sure no one gets hurt
in this house.
This is like, I’d go in my closet and start weeping
and hopefully the bad guys leave.
Like that’s how real things work in the real life.
Yeah.
But she’s been out in combat.
She’s seen kind of the real world.
She’s deal with doctor stuff.
But for some reason, she still has this like,
ridiculous savior complex.
That doesn’t make any fucking sense.
Like she’s running into Russia
and Nadia is like, yeah, I wanna get my boob job.
And she’s like, no, you need to be saved.
And she’s like, no, actually I’m good actually.
She’s like, no, you need to be saved.
And it’s like, okay, I’m like, what is she doing?
I don’t understand what her, like even if Nadia was like,
yeah, I need to be saved.
What would she do?
What could she, she has no idea where she is?
She’s not a Navy SEAL.
She’s just a medic for the army, you know what I mean?
And then she goes into Dubai and does the same thing.
Does it like four different places?
And then she goes to Germany.
She just keeps on doing it.
And I’m like, I know idea where motivation is at all.
You’re not good enough to be a doctor or a military person.
You have to like save everyone,
but then have zero forethought or planning around it.
It makes those heads and can we get to the point
I haven’t got, this is really the biggest issue.
I didn’t know how to put it into the book report.
A plastic surgeon is not doing heart surgery,
better than a heart surgeon.
what is the, It is the one of the dumbest things
I’ve ever seen.
– It’s it.
– It’s so fucking stupid.
– It’s in my notes.
Yeah.
It’s fun to use.
– Maybe your nippeduck, you’re not fucking,
I did so crazy.
We have Mark And Trace, or at least Mark was the heart surgeon
and Trace maybe was-
– They weren’t that good.
They were the most focused.
But Yeah, But She was the plastic surgeon.
So she’s like coming up doing cleanup jobs
and Oleg Garovic at the end need someone to put a new heart
in him and so he’s like, this is you’re the person I want.
And she’s like, I’m a plastic surgeon.
He’s like, yeah, but you can do it.
She’s like, yeah, you’re right, I can’t.
It’s like, what?
Where?
Ow.
So I understand that you’ve witnessed a failed attempt at this,
but and I’m sure you’re, you know, a very good doctor.
But this guy’s gonna choose you to do it.
Get the best heart surgeon and have her there
to like explain the thumper seven and how it works,
but to be like, you’re the one doing this surgery is mind-boggling.
Just absolutely mind-boggling.
– I don’t know how that’s to do with the saber complex,
but oh yes, she was trying to save your dark surgery.
I know what it is, I realize.
I think that she is still piled up
and she’s having like a total recall type thing.
She’s an action hero.
She’s fucking going off to Russia
and traveling the world and doing all these things
and she’s just whole time just either in a coma or tripping.
That makes me way more sense, right?
– If that’s how it ended is like she wakes up from a coma,
I would be like total cop out, but I respect it
’cause now it at least makes sense.
(laughing)
– Yeah, I don’t know.
She has for someone that’s as smart as she is
and presumably street smarts in that she’s,
she’d been a lot of conflict areas and gotten herself out.
– Oh poor chops, this street’s like,
poor chop, one of them is all time, but.
Yeah, terrible, absolutely terrible.
But if she’s just so naive for being the person
that she’s supposed to be getting on this plane,
she’s going to Russia and then she’s talking to these Russian
oligarchs like she has ability now to make decisions.
Like no, you are now in our world.
You’re not gonna be the one here pushing us around.
– And I would have respected her if she was like,
“You know what, I have nothing to lose.
If I get sent over Russia and I get killed because of this,
so be it, my sister’s at a debt now,
we got a lot of money, you know, that was worth it to me.”
Like that would be like, wow, that’s super self-sacrificial.
Like she gets it.
But if she’s like, I’m gonna go over there and save the world.
It’s like, what, what’s going on here?
– My other stock up was saying what’s on your mind,
stock up, when Maggie walks into Gregorovitch’s bedroom,
she says, wow, you could probably fit 100 people in here
for an orgy.
Okay Maggie, I see you.
(laughing)
I see you, first thought, I’d be like, wow,
that’s a massive bedroom.
That would be it.
That would be my first and only thought.
I’d be like, you know, you could probably turn this into
two rooms, have an extra room, you know?
Or like put a pool table in here.
She’s like, 100 people orgy now.
(laughing)
– She’s measuring it actually.
She’s like, the swing would go here.
The, yeah, just so I appreciate that you might have
kind of nowhere for her, for her girl, Maggie.
So, yeah, I respect it.
Yeah, for sure.
stock down with you.
I kind of referenced It earlier.
– We’ll probably be doing lots of cyclical thoughts here,
but you’re fucking not terrible with this thing.
– I don’t think you caught on, but I don’t know if you noticed,
but basically stock down character names.
okay.
As someone That is not very good with character names
or like names in general, I kind of appreciated this.
She would just walk in and she would kind of
did the Austin Powers.
Oh, that guy’s a mole.
Your name Mollie now.
Mollie, Mollie, Mollie, Mollie, Mollie, Mollie, Mollie, Mollie,
like every single security guy guard or guy,
she just gave a name to.
She was like, neck, pork chop, cinder block, beefy.
Like she was giving, like every single guy was just named
an adjective, which, listen, I don’t hate it.
I mean, as someone that’s a writer,
I feel like you should be a little bit more descriptive,
you know, rather than just say,
that guy’s name is beefy because he’s broad children.
It seemed like a little bit redundant
or a little, what’s a word, reductive?
– Yeah, you think the first call, like Corbin’s like,
all right, this could be interesting, you know what I mean?
We should obviously read a lot of books.
She’s, you know, has written some things,
so like she can write, you know, she can put a pen to paper.
And with my, you know, idea for story,
like let’s put it together and she calls them,
she goes, Corbin, I got it, I got it.
The father-in-law, his name’s pork chop,
and he’s in a biker gang.
And he’s like, I thought we were doing like a medical,
medical thriller, she was like, oh, we are.
Yeah, oh, yeah, we are.
Yeah, father-in-law, pork chop, in a biker gang.
He’s like, oh, I’m gonna cast a check, like whatever.
Okay, you’ve –
Fliased a German.
– And there’s people just waiting there,
hundreds of people waiting there for him.
Yeah.
was It hundreds?
was It hundreds or was there Just another party?
hundreds of hundreds of people Just there.
– It was on, he knew all of them,
and he’s had banged every single woman there.
He was a womanizer, but he was also the nicest man ever.
Yeah.
okay.
– He was also in, he’s also like the head of a biker gang.
he also Just murdered someone.
And is comfortable with murdering people.
– Yeah, it’s just, but he’s the nicest guy ever.
It’s like, well, are they not involved
in any illicit activity because it sure seems like it,
based on.
– He’s no for his family demon.
You don’t understand it.
okay.
– He’s not peddling meth?
Yeah, not the McLeish at all.
Yeah, what is the biker gang?
Was it they set up a place in a catchy place
to go to in Baltimore to, as a tourist crowd?
Yeah.
– Or something, but was it,
That was in New York City.
– Yeah, it was like a hard rock cafe,
but it’s for like a biker gang.
– Yeah, it’s time square.
– And he didn’t have a phone, so you knew he’s bad ass.
That’s how you knew.
Yeah.
Oh, my first knockdown is group projects.
So, you remember those group projects in college?
It’d be a pretty straightforward premise
and you’d have months and months to do it.
So naturally you chop it up, give each person a task
and set the meeting for a week before and say,
“Well, I’ll just bring our pieces here,
we’ll put it all together
and we’ll get ready for the presentation.”
Only to show up, this always happened.
You show up there and realize no one had done anything.
The whole thing cracked up on everyone, no one cared,
and now you’re burning midnight oil
to try to get this thing done.
That’s pretty much, it seems like what happened here.
Honestly, what did these two buffoons do besides cash and check
and take our money?
I honestly don’t know.
The fact that you presumably had months
and there’s two of you to write a book
and they’re talking about their collaboration,
they’d have these long phone calls,
they didn’t wanna do like a Gmail thing
’cause they’re not tech savvy, like pork chop,
but they were able to like have all these calls
and you’re calling and you’re talking about this
and it reads like it was written by two people.
Like, I wrote a page and then handed it to you
and you didn’t look at what I wrote,
you just wrote your own page.
The book basically is about what happens after Mark dies,
but all of the, or a good amount of the twists potentially
or the things we’re trying to find out
is what happened before that, you know,
what happened to Mark?
What happened with Trace back then?
So we’re learning about world,
I don’t even remember what the frickin’ company name was,
we’re learning world co-op or whatever the case is.
We’re learning about that, but it’s so interspersed throughout
and you don’t know when you’re like,
all of a sudden they’ll start talking about it,
you’re like, wait, I don’t even think we tied up the last one.
So it kinda feels like the thought I’m on right now
where I’m just like so buffoddled by the whole story
that I can’t even put it right now, I thought.
Two people wrote a Book And then They squeezed It together
and said, “Look’s good does,” and then did zero editing
and just control fine for place
and just added names, characters, wherever.
It didn’t, none of it made sense.
– Yeah, let’s like, you know what?
– The publishing company read this and said,
Okay, cool, we gotta hit on our hands.
I think there’s written, they’re like,
“Oh, whatever, like this is gonna be her only book
’cause oh my God, it’s terrible,
but we’re gonna sell a lot because it’s a reason
for this one book.
It’s a bad premise to begin with.
It’s a terrible premise.
The writing we’ve already talked about is terrible.
The characters are worse and there are legitimately no twists.
There, I don’t even know what the twist were.
We’ll get into it later, but there’s just no twist.
So.
– We’ve read like five or six books from authors
that are, you know, in smaller publishing houses so far.
– Yeah.
– Those are significantly, significantly better
than those.
– We read a medical drama by the guy who’s the dean
of medicine at Michigan University.
He decided to write a book.
I’m sure he’s a wonderful doctor.
His book wasn’t great, but it was a billion times better
than this, like a billion times.
The fact that his book is gonna make no money
and this book is gonna make a ton of money
is a bunch of absolute bullshit.
– Yeah, no, I was gonna agree.
– Well, and this guy actually knows medicine,
like call him up, get some frickin’ tips from him.
Dean of the medical school.
– No, I don’t know before they dive into the,
yeah, then I went to the left atrium.
And I’m like, you can’t do this after this piece.
I should, or should book you this fucking photos.
Members hand like this is a serious medical drama.
– In the interviews, they were like,
we pulled in cardiologists because we wanted it to be really,
like realistic to what was going on.
It’s like, Fine, go ahead, pull in a fucking biker gang”
“and have them shoot both of you in the head.
Steel your money.”””
(laughing)
a classic.
– Did you do a, it stuck down to you,
should I get into mind?
The phones stuck down, the whole phones issue in this book
was an award dumbest shit,
not because it’s unrealistic that she’d run into phone issues,
like that makes sense, but the solutions and the,
everything involving a cell phone in this
was the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.
First, let’s just talk about the fact that she’s like,
Oh, I don’t remember the numbers I have.
Fine, that’s a realistic problem.
She’s like, “No, what I do remember, the pay phone
that’s outside of the restaurant that Pork Shop has.
And she’s like, “Great, I’ll call that.
Calls it one ring answers.
It’s like six o’clock in Dubai,
so she’s calling it like,
I don’t know what time it is,
like nine hours difference.
She’s just expecting him to be sitting inside a pay phone
for 24 hours.
– He was, we’re ready.
Just sitting there, Yeah.
And they know, why is he sitting there in there?
– The pay phone’s in the bar to be clear.
Oh, is it?
– Yeah, whatever it’s said. – What if one ring,
I don’t give a shit.
He’s got to be in the bar, it’s like 10 a.m.
Anyways, all right.
– I can go as soon as she’s gonna call.
right, right, She might be dead.
I don’t know, it’s anyways, dumb as shit.
And then, I mean, this is why you know there’s no editor.
Because she’s like, “Oh, I don’t know anyone,
I don’t know any of these numbers.
But then she says, “No, I’ll call.”
The smarty pants from our school,
that was like the best medical student,
so I can get some other guys number.
How do you fucking know her number?
You don’t even know who it is,
you’re calling her smarty pants.
How do you have her number?
It makes no fuckies.
And then she has internet, email people.
what are We doing here?
It was like a 30 minute drama of her being like,
I need to find a phone.
And then she’s like,
I’m gonna go to ask one of these women
who is clearly taking advantage of him.
And I’m gonna save later.
I’m gonna come back and save them and ask for their phone.
And then there was this like,
it was like this long process to get this phone.
And then she’s like, “Then I went back to my room
and I did some research on the internet.
Yeah, Yeah.
– That’s an email, so I was like,
What the fuck are we doing?
Look up the bar number then.
– God dammit, demon!
what the fuck is this?
like I need to do a bunch of research
that I went on the internet saying,
but how does she know smarty pants is number?
Yeah.
okay.
I made No sense.
Oh my god.
– The phone thing is,
I was just when I was like,
all right, this is what they’re not even trying.
– Yeah, that’s why.
Literally not trying.
It’s a great point.
It’s a great point.
My next lockdown is thrillers.
– I can’t read anymore.
– Yeah, honestly,
it has just thrown me off thrillers, I think.
Well, Just how dare They call this a thriller?
I’ve been more thrilled myself sitting at a DMV
to renew my license than I was reading this.
Wait, what do You ask of this, That verse?
Were you surprised by every single thing
that happened in this book?
‘Cause I never saw anything coming, not one thing.
I had no idea what was going on.
So, did it get through all the way through?
– I didn’t see the literal words coming
when I found out there was like,
this is not a sentence.
What is happening here?
Yeah, Yeah.
But I wanna talk about the story because what is,
when I finished reading this,
I was like, wait, what?
What is the story?
Where are the the thrills?
And I’m honestly,
I was like, am I an idiot
or did I just not understand the story?
So I’m just gonna try to piece it together
and you can fill in or let me know if I’m off base here.
Maggie, her husband, Mark and Trace,
Trace Packer, great, great name.
Leave them live military to start world cures,
a charitable organization where they go into conflict areas
and help save lives, right?
They were in the military now they’re not.
Or at least she was.
During their time at world cures,
they create a new artificial heart system,
the cutting edge, Thumper 7.
Unbeknownst to Maggie, the main benefactor for world cures
is this Russian oligarch, Oleg Raghorevich.
Also on Benot’s to Maggie,
Mark and Trace are helping Oleg use world cures
to launder money for him
and on top of that trace,
and I think just Trace is using world cures
to harvest organs for the black market trade.
Mark dies, he gets murdered by some child soldiers
so we think at the time.
Maggie loses her medical license
’cause she starts popping bills.
She gets recruited to perform a clandestine surgery
in Russia, which she takes because they give her money.
The surgery goes good, but somehow ends
in her needing to escape and be in a shootout.
She gets picked up by a CIA or MI6 guy
who sends her to Dubai for another surgery.
I don’t know why she’s going to Dubai for that surgery.
No idea.
There she runs into Nadia, Oleg’s girlfriend,
even if she was fuck with Maggie,
but back in his place with the tattoo,
Oleg gets murdered on the dance floor.
Maggie gets out of Dodge to find her way to France,
but there are France and Germany, I don’t know.
But there’s some, ’cause there’s some link there,
Port Chop meets her and he’s teamed up
with some local French motorcycle gang.
It turns out Oleg didn’t die.
It was his cousin who was his body double
that he had murdered, so his enemies wouldn’t leave him alone.
He needs a new heart, forces Maggie to use
a Thumper-7 to give him a transplant,
which he does successfully,
even though she’s a plastic surgeon.
Nadia confronts Maggie at gunpoint
accusing her of killing Trace.
Uh-huh, Port Chop entered stage left and pulls a gun
on Nadia, saying that he was the one who killed Trace
because Trace was the one that killed Mark.
Nadia denies any involvement
in Port Chop lets her go on her way, role credits.
Well, Maybe interject a couple things.
Yep, please.
– One is why, so the guy that’s getting plastic surgery, right?
Yeah, the… – in Russia.
– Yeah. – Does he know, he knows he’s getting
plastic surgery, right?
I don’t get, what is he surprised about when he looks
in the mirror? – Yeah, what is he thinking?
Because he’s surprised when he looks in the mirror
because he looks so much like his cousin now,
but he also is his cousin’s body double, so, like, yeah.
Yeah, And then he freaks out And then They decide
to start shooting her for some reason?
– Yeah, I didn’t understand that part.
And then Nadia puts a tattoo on her leg to play mind.
a temporary tattoo.
To play mind games, yeah.
one, how Does She know what the tattoo looks like?
how do You create a temporary tattoo?
Two.
how do You do that? – how do You do that?
How do you create the tattoo?
And then why is that a mind game?
I don’t get…
– ‘Cause she’s like Mark had this tattoo, so.
I mean, It was a red herring.
why Does She have it?
– A book that the character is doing,
like the character is being like,
I’m red herring you in the book?
– Yeah. – Is that what’s…
Yeah.
It was like a red herring, right?
Is that what it was?
She’s like trying to mess with it.
I don’t… – Between the guys that?
And them trying to make us believe
almost saying that the gruff voice surgeon
who is wearing a baseball cap at the end
and is in Chris Pine’s voice.
It’s Chris Pine’s voice.
But it’s Mark. – Mark’s art.
– Mark, ’cause Mark’s dead.
So it was like, that was a red herring,
but it was one, so dumb.
And two, what is going on?
And then I read fucking Goodreads
and there’s people on there being like,
“Oh my God, I wanted the gruff voice to be Mark so bad,
crying face emoji.”
I’m like, who are these people?
Round them up, round them up, get ’em up.
Fuck outta here, send ’em on a spaceship.
Send ’em on blue Mars and get ’em outta here.
Who is actually carrying and crying face emoji that?
It was so bad.
That’s what I was, oh my God.
If this was set up for sequel, it’s like Mark’s alive.
It is set up As a sequel, right?
It’s a Nark not alive.
That’s why she couldn’t run down the guy with the hat,
right? – Why?
She got to come out of the gun.
Why would pork chop kill Trace?
‘Cause key Trace went to kill Lark?
– He’s dead.
Oh my God, no.
– Hey God. – He’s alive, good.
I don’t know to tell you there.
– Mark has been coming, ’cause Brace herself for it now.
Oh my god.
Did You have anything else to clear up about That storyline?
– There’s so many things.
Oh, here’s one thing, that was big.
Nadia is so in love with Trace
that she gets with a Russian oligarch and bangs him
for like two months to find one person
to potentially do a surgery on that person.
That is what we’re going with.
– Yeah, it’s, she, what is hoping
that he’s gonna need this surgery on his cousin
or was she just walking around being,
was the boobs first, the boob job first, you think,
and then he said, “Oh, well, I’m doing a boob job.
“I might as well transform my cousin’s face
to look more like me so that I can have him murdered.”””
how is the plot line though
that Nadia is so in love with this guy
that she’s banging this Russian dude
in order to potentially, someone do that?
– That part’s not crazy.
I feel like we’ve seen that in James Bond movies
or something like that.
You are someone, love with someone,
but in order to get back with that,
you have to do a person.
– But no, that part, that giant leap,
where it’s like, because then I’ll be able to suggest
this surgeon from the United States, who’s a woman
who I’m sure this Russian oligarch will wanna use.
Her whole family lives in Missouri or Kansas.
She just fly to the US and co-visit your family
and then take a drive to Baltimore and say,
Hey, by the way, did you kill this person?
– Yeah. – That’s all you,
why do you have to bang a Russian dude in Russia?
What, it doesn’t make any sense to you, man.
Why would you do that?
– It’s a great point.
It’s a really…
– It’s not like she’s, anything limiting her.
She’s like a rich person, too, at this point.
Yeah, this is true.
It was…
(laughs)
– It’s stupid to you, man.
(laughs)
is this the worst Book We ever read?
It’s out there.
It’s really up there.
As I was doing notes today, like I hated it as I did it,
and then as I’m putting notes together,
I was just getting angrier and angrier,
’cause like all the things were coming back
and how they didn’t make any sense.
You know, sometimes I say, “Hey, I listened to books at night
and the books are so good that I can’t fall asleep,”
because I’m just, you know, lost in the book.
Same thing happened here, but for the opposite reason,
I was just like confused and angry
that I was wasting my life listening to this bullshit.
So I just like turn it off and be like,
What the fuck did I just listen to for 20 minutes?
Honestly, both of them.
Oh, also, Trace was a name We heard like three times.
We’re nine tens in the book and they’re like,
Oh, by the way, Trace is the bad guy.
Who the fuck is Trace again?
Yeah.
– I didn’t even know who the bad guy was.
Who?
Is he, was he?
I honestly don’t know.
When you said he was,
’cause they, they introduced like 10 doctors,
and all of them are good looking
and the best and the fucking biggest dicks in the world
and they all are womanizers.
And I’m like, “All right, I guess.
I don’t, okay.
They’re all the same character.”
So I don’t know who the fuck Trace is.
– Yeah, I guess let’s be clear on the twist here.
One of the twists, probably the biggest one is like,
Trace killed Mark, and then the other one is that
pork shop killed Trace and…
– But I didn’t know we were even going after Trace.
How is it, I didn’t know he was protecting her.
Like, how is it, you know what I mean?
– Well, that’s what I’m saying.
Then these are the twists,
which one art twist and two,
we don’t care enough about any of these people.
– We don’t know them.
Yeah, exactly.
I don’t know Trace.
I don’t care whether he killed or was killed.
And then it was insinuated that they harvested Trace’s organs
or whatever at the end, supposedly.
– Oh, that’s who gave him the heart or something, right?
I guess so, Yeah.
– That was, I didn’t mind that.
I actually liked that.
– That’s the one that gave the Russian,
oh, he gave pork chop to the heart,
to the heart of the whole of that.
– I don’t mind that.
That’s pretty, that’s pretty agorian, I appreciate it.
How long ago did Trace die?
I’m watching the Frankenstein movie on Netflix.
You need that heart, like, stat.
You don’t need the, like–
like, put It in the AI mark.
Mark preserved it.
Do you not understand how AI mark works?
– Like, unless Trace, he brought,
poor chop brought Trace to Germany
and just murdered him in the other room,
then like that heart ain’t gonna survive.
That’s just, the cells will start to disintegrate immediately.
– I don’t worry about that.
He put it on a nice guy.
what are We talking about?
It’s fine.
He put it in his overhead bag,
it’s about to terminate.
Oh my god.
Dance clubs, stock down.
The only part of this book that had me feeling any sort of way
was the claustrophobia I had as they desiled the Dubai club scene.
You know, so many sweaty people
breathing all up on your face.
Absolutely terrible.
I’m happy to say for one that, you know,
my clubbing days are far behind me
and then I couldn’t be happier about that.
But Maggie, I will also say,
Maggie is not a good hang, clearly.
She’s freaking out in this club
and then, you know, talking back about how she took a pill
at a music venue in Western mass
and went crazy, need to call a medic.
It’s really embarrassing stuff.
You know, take the drugs and be chill.
You know, no one wants to be that crazy person.
So Maggie, not a good hang,
don’t invite her to a festival
or any kind of music show where they’re having narcotics gone.
Even though she became a pill popper.
So, yeah, I don’t know.
Yeah, wait a minute everyone’s buzzed too.
She’s like, they’re like, oh, it sticks on me.
And she’s like, actually, I took a pill 20 years ago
in Springfield and I was throwing up.
It’s like, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, so just a little bit.
This is very story that’s all the people.
Other stock down is New York Times bestseller, whatever.
Anytime I see New York Times bestseller from here on out,
it’s gonna mean absolutely nothing to me.
It will mean literally, literally nothing.
If I turn a penny over and look at the serial number
or whatever the case is, it will mean as much to me
as reading that serial number.
It’s like a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame
or an Oscar, they’re clearly bought and not earned.
Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.
I was gonna say favorite part of storyline,
but I mean, what do, what do I do?
Did I think that the altruistic billionaire?
I thought he was a good guy.
I think if anything, he’s hiding money in charities
and advancing technology and science.
They’re like, what a dickhead.
I’m like, what?
You could be hiding your money in fucking yacht clubs.
I don’t really understand, they were upset with him
that he was laundering money through a big charity?
What was the issue?
I didn’t get it.
Oh, the issue is that, yeah, he was laundering the money.
So he’d upcharge things, like four times as much,
but then he would pay it, basically charging the company
that he would then pay.
So he was laundering money through it.
do You want him to do a laundry shop?
– It’s not that big of a deal, yeah.
Also, they don’t explain what else he’s doing.
Oh, it’s to fund his child sex trafficking things.
Oh, okay, that guy’s a bad guy.
The only thing we knew he funded was World Cures,
which was going around helping people.
Yeah, so Yeah.
– Like I said, that guy’s good.
And he’s advancing technology.
He’s like, let’s do all these fucking wild things
with technology.
I’ll start.
What a guy.
Yeah, appreciate him.
Yeah, a lot of similar to the Frankenstein movie.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I definitely did not have a favorite part,
but you obviously have your best character right there.
I will say worst character, Maggie, clearly.
I mean, she’s not a real person.
She’s not set in reality.
She’s a character of a human being.
They go through at one point,
and I don’t know if you caught this.
And I might be making this up
because I couldn’t find it anywhere
and I didn’t like screenshot the moment,
which I usually do and go back to it.
But I’m almost certain of this.
They went through this list of all of the things
that she has done and can do.
The next one being even more absurd than the last.
Obviously she’s a, you know, whatever, a brilliant surgeon
in this case, but they’re talking about her military career
and her training and all this and I was like, come on.
And they just keep getting more absurd.
And then the cherry on top,
and almost 100% certain they said this,
is that they said she was a Medal of Honor recipient.
Did you get that?
I thought She was a Purple Heart.
Was she a Medal of Honor?
– I’m almost certain they said she was a Medal of Honor.
I mean, I, Yeah, make sense of it.
so when Did She get this Medal of Honor?
What did she do to earn it?
There were only 28 given out during the Afghan,
Afghan Iraqi wars.
There have also been in history,
about 200 recipients for non-combat incidents.
But one, they stopped awarding that Medal
for non-combat situations in 1963 and two,
it was mostly given to Navy men who acted heroically
during naval disasters like boilers, explosions
or men overboard.
So out of the 3,500 Medal of Honor’s awarded,
only 79 were for medical personnel.
79, and that’s since eight, the 1860s.
Do you know how many women have been awarded
the Medal of Honor Keith?
One, fucking one.
And it was during the Civil War, all right?
– Maggie’s different, good.
Do you not understand that she’s the best surgeon ever?
She can do heart surgery without practicing
or doing any research on heart surgery.
I cannot believe They Just threw in a throw away line
that she won the Medal of Honor.
And it was like, what?
That is, I wanna hear that story because
what the fuck did this surgeon do, this woman surgeon do?
And I have no problem with her being women.
I’m just saying the statistical facts
of who gets these Medal of Honor’s.
It was Mary Walker, God rest her soul in like,
nine, 18, 1868, you know?
So it’s just not a thing that would happen.
I also needed more on what she did that was so bad.
I assume someone came in, she was high
and she made them look like the Joker.
Like what did she do exactly?
You’re not walking into a conference
and people are like, oh my God, that person there is a shitty,
it was like no one, that’s what the problem with a lot
of these books is is like,
every main character is somehow every single person
in the whole story knows every single bad thing they’ve done.
It’s like, that’s not no world, it works like this.
Especially in a profession, like the medical profession,
like yeah, you might have like some gossip in your hospital,
let’s say you’re not going to a professional profession,
the person from Saudi Arabia comes in and is like,
oh, there is this person, I remember they did something
that they got caught, you know,
and got their medical license.
Yeah, Well I will say, I will say that.
– I will say that it is very likely that if she,
I mean, I don’t think she did anything crazy.
She just was clearly on drugs.
– She’s not doing surgery, she’s doing plastic surgery.
– She’s on drugs as she was doing surgery,
got caught last her medical license.
so there would be definitely some scuttle butt For sure.
I think the whole, your husband got chopped up with machete
and her mom just died.
She’s probably having a tough time,
would be a little bit forgiving, I think most people
would be, but that’s a great thing.
– Yeah, well I don’t think, I think people,
there might be some whisperings,
but I don’t think it would be a situation
where she shows up for her mom’s award ceremony
and people are like, you have got to leave.
Oh my God, you cannot be here.
It’s like, this is my mom, what?
Yeah, right.
I lost my medical license.
I’m not gonna perform surgery here.
I’m just here to see the show.
What did he do?
right, right.
That’s why I was like, oh,
she might have killed a school of kids.
Like they came in and she just started to get chopped.
one by one.
Chopping them up For something.
I was like, oh.
What about, what about loves?
Would you love about it?
I thought Chris Pine was good.
there is Just Pine or bro.
– There’s stuff in there, yeah.
– If you cut this book out and just took like one idea from it,
you’d be like, okay, I can see that being a good book.
So yeah, there’s potential.
Which one?
Honestly, which one?
‘Cause I don’t even, I don’t even see it.
I mean, it could be a medical show, but the Thumper Sevens.
I have the rewrite on the Hate, You know what I do.
– Okay. – I don’t just complain.
I come with it.
Yeah, Okay, gotcha.
All right, well, I’ll let you get to it
’cause the only thing I have for love is,
I love that I never have to read a research
from a book club book again.
Read another one of her books, see a movie that she’s in
or a TV show that she’s in, she’s full on dead to me.
So that’s what I love about it.
Hate’s what he got.
– Hate’s, I’ll rewrite the book.
So here’s what happens.
Turns out her husband actually isn’t this amazing, dude.
Him and Pork Chop, the head of the Biker gang,
Tom the best way in life is cutting some corners.
So he’s not this, this squeaky, clean doctor.
He’s the one over in Russia that’s selling kidneys
in the black market, keeping his wife in the no-no,
you know, it just doesn’t know anything about that.
He’s got that side good going.
He ends up getting snuffed out by this Russian oligarch
competitor, right?
Because, you know, he’s in their space.
He’s fucking trying to take this olig’s business,
which is selling kidneys in the black market
and he’s trying to come in there.
Maggie gets told this fucking dumb story about how he’s amazing
and he’s done this African thing,
but ultimately we know he’s a shitty person.
However, she’s not in the wiser,
and her sister, Cresus AI version,
starting the Doomday scenario of AI,
where Mark, who is this very, very smart, evil person,
is now taking things into his own hands
as an AI sent in a being.
And he starts to take out anyone that gets in his way
of trying to rule the world and become
not only the new bike gang leader,
but the world leader through AI.
What do you think?
Pretty good, right?
– It’s so bad.
But it’s better than this.
– That’s good.
– It’s so bad.
How’s that bad?
– It’s like the 13 floor exterminator.
It’s terminator.
I just determined it a lot.
I took the same stuff that was in this book,
and I shaped it in one direction.
James Cameron did.
Yeah, thank you.
– Yeah, there’s nothing in this book
that you could take.
Absolutely nothing.
I liked it.
I mean, It would have been more interesting If Mark
just wasn’t the guy we thought he was or something.
Anything, anything would have been more interesting
than whatever happened.
Then the bad guy being a guy who wasn’t even in the
freaking book, the bad guys.
And the oligarch’s heart still beating at the end
is I don’t know why that matter.
It’s okay, cool.
I don’t know about it.
He’s in a coma, but it’s heart-sturgeon.
– He’s the best.
That was great at the end.
They’re like, hey, what’s going on with olig?
He’s like, well, he’s in a coma,
but his heart still beating.
She’s like, nice.
Okay, cool.
I did my work.
He’s like, well, he’s in a fucking coma.
She didn’t do a good job.
He’s not in a good way.
Listener male, I don’t think we have any.
So we’re gonna go for a good read review of the week,
which I’ll be doing if we don’t have any listener male.
Comes just from Katie Tarozion.
So Katie, we appreciate it.
This was one of the stupidest God damn books
I’ve ever read, one star.
(laughs)
Shred to the point.
I love that.
I love Katie.
Katie, fan of the program.
Let’s send this to Katie.
– It’s about 45 minutes to do what you did in 10 words.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
– Cast the movie, don’t care.
Do you not be made into a movie?
Every character is bladed by reason this one dressed
as a different, as the last character.
Any movie.
Yeah, Yeah.
It’s an any more, it’s a comedy actually.
It’s me pretty good.
It’s Nuddy Professor, just Bruce,
Bruce with his spoon in the role of a lifetime,
a roles of a lifetime.
Anytime I have an imposter syndrome,
like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,
like how do I have this job?
What am I, you know, like I feel like I don’t belong?
I’m just gonna think about Bruce with his spoon,
writing a book, ’cause holy shit,
these people must have the biggest egos
in the goddamn worlds to think that not a matching,
you have to go an old press tour
and talk about this book,
and it’s so fucking bad,
you have to actually believe that it’s good?
You have, you’re that,
so self-absorbed and narcissistic that you read this book
after you finished it, and said,
“Wow, I did a bang-up job.
It is an embarrassment.”
I am, I don’t even know, this is probably,
well, I’m–
I Did, And the prologue was good, though.
I was like, the prologue was fine.
– Yeah, I was like, yeah, this is good,
I think she would be this good of a writer.
– Cool, we’re in a conflict zone,
and this guy’s trying to perform surgery,
he says, “No, get out of here, I’ll save the kid.”
Okay, cool, I’ve seen this before, Michael Bay movie, got it?
Okay, we’re on a roll.
This is gonna be great.
And then fucking this bullshit, I just can’t believe it.
I honestly can’t believe it.
Keith, would you recommend this book and who’s it for?
– Yeah, this is a top, top, not top 10, I guess, P.N.,
so yeah, it’s just a question of where it ranks in the bottom.
It’s down there, so it’s 0.5.
– We get pretty sad if something gets in our top 10,
or even top 20 at this point, it’s like,
oh, great, outside Harry Potter, obviously,
is that lives in the, all his own thing.
Yeah.
– But yeah, we might not just start doing a bottom 10,
because I, I actually maybe I don’t want to ever remember
this book, but yeah, it’s clearly,
clearly in the bottom 10.
It is, whatever I said, it’s funny, you said,
that thing earlier that I had mentioned the last time
about her being a shill and just trying to steal our money,
or whatever, this exactly what she did again,
and she, yeah, she got us, she got us.
– I guess fool me once, but she,
Yeah, fool me twice, never gonna fool me again.
Yeah, exactly.
– And I think we’ve done that before
with Reese Witherspoon Book Club,
and now we’re here again, so yeah,
I would not recommend this to anybody.
I am not, I’m not a social organizer,
I am not a protester, I’m sorry,
like I just, that’s just not in my blood,
obviously, if something terrible is happening,
maybe I would get out there,
but I might get out there for this.
Like I might go to Barnes and Noble’s,
if it existed, and would hold up a sign saying,
Do not buy this book.
That is how Adam and Dime,
I would take a day off of work to drive into the city,
to stand outside the store.
I would support You with that.
I would go out there with the family.
absolutely, I would go out.
You know, I wanna say people,
– You gotta get back to the causes you believe in,
and I appreciate that.
– Yeah, I would not only not recommend this book to anybody,
I will tell them that they should not read it.
It is, yeah, a .5 star, I think that’s fair.
Just, it had word on the page,
like signing your name on the SATs,
you get an automatic score of .5,
but outside of that terrible, terrible book,
a real shame that they’re going out
and taking people’s money in this economy.
In this economy, you can’t be doing that.
So, yeah, Reese, see you never.
All right, well, hey, that was cathartic, so I appreciate it.
What do we got coming to next?
– Well, this time, I hope we’re doing either,
the will of many by James Ezington,
is Langton, or we have one second.
Carried away by TJ Derry.
That’s a new author one, so.
– Yeah, that’s like a new book.
I mean, they’re both coming out,
they’re both gonna be the next two,
which just depends on when we chat,
when we chat with TJ.
Maybe we should send him and he’ll be like,
hey, I know you want to talk about your book,
but will you go and read Gone Before Good Die?
get a real conversation.
– You can just talk about that and what’s wrong with it?
Because we can play in for 50 straight minutes,
but I honestly think there’s another 30 minutes
that we didn’t even like get,
if you drill down into other things,
the assholes of the books,
I think we could find more.
There’s more to dig up, honestly.
There’s so many.
The guy at the in Dubai, who’s her fixer guy,
who’s an ex-US special forces person,
and he’s helping her,
but he’s also helping this family
that we don’t know anything about.
His character is me, and he spends either,
there was any time they introduced new characters,
it’s like, oh, this person.
Oh, Beefy?
Gimme.
– He’s done this.
Senator Block.
Senator block the door.
Oh, okay.
Okay, Well, Yeah.
So we’ll catch you for those two books,
and that was Gone Before Goodbye,
and I’m glad to say goodbye to this one.
– All right, I’ll catch you the next week.
All right. – Bye now.