In the spirit of our earlier “happy computer memories” thread, I’ll open one for happy book memories. What’s a book you read that occupies a warm-and-fuzzy spot in your memory? What book calls you back to the first time you read it, the way the smell of a bakery brings back a conversation with a friend?
As a child, I was into mystery stories and Ancient Egypt both (not to mention dinosaurs and deep-sea animals and…). So, for a gift one year I got an omnibus set of the first three Amelia Peabody novels. Then I read the rest of the series, and then new ones kept coming out. I was off at science camp one summer when He Shall Thunder in the Sky hit the bookstores. I don’t think I knew of it in advance, but I snapped it up and read it in one long summer afternoon with a bottle of soda and a bag of cookies.
I didn’t misspend my youth in any of the normal ways. Instead I got moderately invested in what was then called the Star Wars Expanded Universe and is now called Legends canon. On one hand I still glance fondly at the two separate editions I have of Timothy Zahn’s Thrown trilogy, with one being a newer set I picked up at a con to get signed and the other being the half-deatroyed set of old paperbacks I assembled from used book sales over a solid ~5 years or so, each of which was in at least fair condition when I first got it and is now much farther from it from the ravages of being carried around by a teenager and read and reread in any spare 5-10 minutes that didn’t have anything else to do. Oh the joys of having ADHD before smart phones were ubiquitous.
The tradeoff is that by virtue of picking things out of used book sales rather than seeking out specific series and the like is that I read so much weird junk The Jedi Academy trilogy which culminated in Luke’s first class of students collectively force pushing a whole fleet of star destroyers into interplanetary space? Yep. The Corellian trilogy featuring Han’s villainous cousin and yet another galaxy-rending superweapon that will only respond to a small child? Read it. Darksaber where Jabba the Hutt’s nephew tries to build his own death star only to be undone by his own corner cutting and incompetent workforce? Oh yeah. I also had bits and pieces of the Scholastic Book Fair-approved Jedi Apprentice series of YA stories about Obi-wan and Qui-gon’s adventures before episode I and more interestingly for this thread a few parts of a different children’s series I can’t remember the name of featuring a Jedi prince, multiple attempts to impersonate the emperor’s son, attempts to recreate iconic force powers with technobabble, and various other nonsense. Oh, and I almost forgot about the one where the rebels and empire team up immediately after Endor to fight off an attack from an army of soul-stealing dinosaur people.
It got so weird, so stupid, and honestly I loved it all the more for that. The little Bantam Books sticker managed to get past my elitist attitude towards straight-up fanfiction and the editing was just strict enough to keep everything coherent and readable, allowing me to have a whole lot of good times reading a very very mixed bag of books.
I don’t think the Scholastic Book Fair ever gave its blessing to the Star Trek Voyager tie-in novel where a derelict starship is the centerpiece of a battle between alien races-of-the-week that has raged for generations and stripped the metal from all the habitable planets in the sector. The derelict is from the species of the “this is tranya, I hope you relish it as much as I” guy played by Ron Howard’s brother.