February 2018 – Page 3 – The Designer Monologues

February 23, 2018February 23, 2018

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 23

Today’s challenge: A book you’ve wanted to read for a long time, but haven’t.

Yeah, there’s a pretty long list. My “to be read” pile grows constantly.

I’m going to go with something a bit left-field.

In the 1970s, Donald F. Glut (probably best known for eventually doing the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back) cranked out a series of pulp paperbacks featuring Frankenstein’s Monster. A few years back, a friend of mine, Bill Cunningham, via his company (Pulp 2.0), signed a deal to reprint them. The first volume, collecting the first six novels in the series, came out in 2014.

I immediately put it on my Amazon Wish List. Classic horror movies and monsters was one of the earliest things I was a fan of, and I still eat this stuff up. Plus, published by a friend of mine. But, four years later, for various reasons (most related to being too busy with other things), I have yet to pick it up, and so it still sits on my list…now joined by Volume 2, which collects the last six books in Glut’s series, which Bill just released.

So, in a way, this entry is a reminder to myself to get on that, as soon as I feel I have the spare funds.

February 22, 2018

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 22

Today’s challenge: a book that makes you cry.

Well, I’ve already answered this one, back on Day 6, with “a book that made you sad.” So, you can go check that one, and come back tomorrow.

February 21, 2018

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 21

Today’s challenge — the first novel you remember reading.

My memories are a bit hazy — a factor of growing older, so they tell me. I clearly remember reading three paperback novels at around the same time, when I was 8. Through a bit of memory-detail-spotting and comparing them to known chronologies (release dates, where I was living, etc.), I have figured out that the first novel I remember reading was the novelization of Star Wars, ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, which I read in the Fall of 1977, and many times more throughout my adolescence.

(For those curious, the other two novels were Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which I read immediately following the broadcast of the animated version in late November of the same year, and another Alan Dean Foster paperback, Star Trek: Log One (not a novel, a collection of short stories, adapting the animated episodes), which I read around Christmas.)