Star Wars Book of the Month Club

[Allie Fox]

Hey folks. I'm not sure how many of you read the Star Wars books but I wanted to give everyone an opportunity to develop our small community here while we wait for Attack of the Clones.

I want to invite everyone here to a new club called the Star Wars Book of the Month Club. The idea is to get together once a month a discuss a different Star Wars book. We will meet at different times to accomodate the different time zones. Each month we will choose a new book to read and prepare for review and discussion at the end of the following month.

For the first meeting, I have chosen Splinter of the Mind's Eye. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at darth_kayos@hotmail.com

Here are the details:

Topic: Splinter of the Mind's Eye
Date: October 30
Time: 10:00 p.m. (EST)
Place: mIRC Jedi Talk chat room or go to Jedi Talk and click on Real Time chat.

I hope to see you there.

Cheers!

AF

[JediCole]

Good choice to start such an ambitious project. I wish you the best of luck and hopefully I can find my worn out old copy and join in on the fun.

Admittedly I do not usually care for the Star Wars books and avoid most of them. Part of the problem lies in the necessity of casting created by having a solid, idetifiable "look" for the core characters and no real idea of what the book-specific characters look like, too much of a mix of the real and imagined, something you don't get with original material. This is the same problem I've had with the Star Trek novels. The frame of reference is too strong for the core characters while the others are just blank spaces interacting with them.

The other primary problem has been a sense of disappontment in the structure and often the plots of these books. One problem Sith Worm (who has read far more of these than I have) pointed out is that the early novels seemed to be written under the opressive yoke of tight LucasFilm controls and a doctrine that a reference to specific events and locales in the Trilogy be dropped in at every possible point in the story. Later novels seem to have shed this but often seem to have their authors injecting the things that interest them most into a Star Wars context (it appears the author of Shadows of the Empire has a fondness for racing, hence the dreadful explorations of Swoop Bike culture).

Perhaps a reading club is just the sort of thing to inspire me to give the novels (and subsequent "expanded universe") a second chance. The "Black Fleet Crisis" saga just left a terrible taste in my mouth as it built and built and built, then fizzled patheticly.

[Lobito]

Why dont we discuss it in this thread???

[Eternal Padawan]

Welcome back Allie Fox!

And you would choose the ONE SW book I DON'T have in my library to discuss first off. I am in the middle of the Daly Han Solo trilogy right now. Then a quick reread of Harry Potter and Fellowship of the Ring before the movies come out, then Star By Star which hits shelves in two weeks.

But I'll pop over to see what others have to say about it.

[JediTricks]

I'm gonna move this thread to the Comics & Books section since it's a book thread.

[Allie Fox]

Thanks for the votes of confidence guys!

The reason I don't hold the discussion here in the forums (or any other forums, for that matter) is because I want to get a real time discussion going on. I don't see why there can't be further discussioin after(or even before) the actual meeting.

JC- I admit that I, too am not a huge fan of the Expanded Universe, but I want to get a feel of what other people think of the EU and how they connect it to the saga as a whole. I hope that in discussion with others I can gain a wider insight into the many novels and stories that have been written since 1978.

I hope to see you guys (and anyone else you can invite) there on October 30 at 10:00 p.m. (EST).

Cheers!

AF

[Allie Fox]

Just a reminder!

Tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. (EST).

I hope to see you there.