The movie (that I literally didn’t know existed until right this moment) is based on a novel by Anne Rice, under the pen name Anne Rampling.

She also wrote a series of BDSM novels about Sleeping Beauty under the pen name A. N. Roquelaure.

No idea what your reading level is, but here are some of the suggestions I’ve made to customers recently:

Harry Potter, if for no other reason than the cultural impact

Ender’s Game: children being taught to be elite military officers

Small Gods: satirizes religion, religious institutions, etc. If you ever want to read Discworld, this is a very good starting point

We Free Men: also Discworld, but YA-focused and about a girl who becomes a witch

Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal: author imagines what Jesus and his BFF Biff were doing for those thirty years missing not recorded in the Bible.

Kindred: a woman starts to travel back in time to the pre-Civil War South. She can’t control it and she doesn’t know why. Probably Butler’s most accessible novel.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: humanity nuked itself back to the early medieval period and this one holy order watches it rebuild. It’s hard to describe this book in a satisfactory way without just summarizing it, but it’s one of my favorites and I’ve read it multiple times

The Giver: YA dystopian novel about a very structured society and the kid who is able to see through it. The sequels aren’t too bad either

The Hobbit: much easier to read than Lord of the Rings, but full of the same heroics plus dragons, dwarves and a clever hero

The Venture Bros. had an entire episode about this and it was excellent.

It has a barter system, but you don’t need to use it if you don’t want to. Nearly everything you need in the game can be harvested or made.

Their other game, Grow: Song of the Evertree, is pretty fun too. It’s partly a city builder, partly exploring new worlds that you create. It’s been a while since I played it, so I remember some sort of currency, but I don’t really remember having to work that hard for it. Mostly, I just focused on creating worlds with crazy elements.

Yes… As you age…

Your friend is an idiot. MRNA vaccines are not new. Scientists have been working on a vaccine since SARS, which is similar to COVID (aka SARS-CoV-2). One of the reasons why medication can take so long to reach the public is that it takes money, which likely come from grants, which take time and have limited amounts to go around. When the pandemic broke out, countries around the world threw money at these labs. Everything else pretty much stopped, so they didn’t have to wait for an understaffed and underfunded FDA to approve it.

Getting the vaccine is much better than slowly suffocating because the virus destroyed your lungs. Herd immunity only works when enough people have been vaccinated and clearly we haven’t reached that yet since people are still getting infected, reinfected and dying.