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.)

30 Day Book Challenge, Day 20

Today’s challenge: Favorite romance book.

I don’t read the romance genre, generally speaking… but, the more I thought about this challenge, the more I realized that I actually did, it’s just that it wasn’t sold as romance.

But come on: Tell me that Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire isn’t a romance.

I mean, hell — just from the publisher’s marketing text for the latest edition:

“Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.”

Sure sounds like a romance to me.