Books I've Read Recently: A Book Discussion

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm here to talk about a couple of books that I've read recently. Originally I had planned on doing individual reviews for each of these books, but neither fits into the way I do my blog these days since one of them is a Stephen King novel, which I didn't read until a couple of years ago, and I'm also not doing the "My Star Wars Experience" series on a weekly basis anymore, so this Star Wars novel also doesn't fit into the "My 90's and 2000's Experience". So I'm just gonna ramble about It by Stephen King, which was published in 1986, just before I was born, and A New Dawn by John Jackson Miller, which was published in 2014, a little over ten years ago. So let's get into it, starting with A New Dawn.

I cannot believe that it's been a little over ten years since A New Dawn was published (September 2nd, 2014). I also can't believe it's been ten years and 13 days since Star Wars Rebels debuted. The fact that I finally got to watch the show last year, before Ahsoka came out, and I finally got to read this book after ten years is incredible. I'll be honest, I really didn't know very much about this book when it first came out. I vaguely remember reading about it in an issue of Star Wars Insider, but I couldn't tell you what issue I read about it in. I just wasn't interested in it. By 2014 I had stopped buying Star Wars novels, even having stopped catching up on the Legends novels that I hadn't gotten to, having finished off with Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn (2013) and X-Wing: Mercy Kill by Aaron Allston (2012). There were just too many coming out, and I just wasn't as interested in them as I had been in the 90's and 2000's. Especially the ones coming out in the early 2010's.

Having watched Rebels last year though, I decided I wanted to read A New Dawn to see how Kanan and Hera met. Plus, having read John Jackson Miller's 2013 novel, Kenobi, last year, I was excited to see how he handled these two characters. Luckily the Force was with me because last month I went to visit my buddy Jonathan, who lives out of town, and he just happened to have the 2015 paperback edition of A New Dawn in his Star Wars book collection, and he lent it to me. I really enjoyed it. So much had been hinted at in Rebels, but it was fun to actually get to see the beginning of the relationship between these two awesome characters. I swear I could hear Freddie Prinze Jr. and Vanessa Marshall's voices as Kanan and Hera everytime I read their dialogue. I was also intrigued to see the beginning of Rae Sloan's Imperial career in this book, given that she's also the central antagonist of the Aftermath trilogy.

I'm not a big fan of Stephen King. Nor am I a fan of Horror. Yet, I'm a sucker for coming of age stories. I always have been. Which is what drew me to his 1986 novel, It. Especially after I'd seen the 2017 movie adaptation on Blu-ray a few years ago. I love the book. However, I'm not a fan of the edition that I own. I have the 2017 trade paperback edition, which is so heavy I could barely hold it long enough to get through more than one chapter at a time. Especially because of how long each chapter is. I at least tried to read two chapters a day, one chapter per reading session, and that worked well enough for me that I could get the book finished before the end of the month, it being the Halloween season now.

I found Richie to be way too obnoxious for my taste, but I liked the other main characters alot. Particularly Eddie, and Ben and Bill. Eddie, because he's similar to me due to him being medically fragile, and Ben and Bill because they were social outcasts. Plus their names are actually the same as two of the trains in the Thomas the Tank Engine book and TV series, and that was one of my favourite things when I was a kid. I know, I'm weird.

Also, it's funny because I actually knew who Beverly and Richie were before I even knew what It was. My very first Stephen King novel was the 2011 novel, 11/22/63, which is a time travel novel that deals with what might happen if someone prevented the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In the book, the main character, Jake, travels back to September, 1958, after the events of It. He briefly visits Derry, which is the town that It takes place in, and randomly meets Bev and Richie. I had no idea that those two characters were from It as I actually didn't know a thing about Stephen King or his books, and I still don't since I'm not interested in his books in general, with It and 11/22/63 being the exception.

That's gonna be it for me for today my friends. I just wanted to talk about these two books for a bit, and didn't feel like doing individual reviews for either of them. Though I definitely plan on getting a mass market paperback edition of It at some point and if I do get one, I'll try to do a blog post on it at some point. Until then though, I might have another blog post coming out on Friday this week. I haven't decided yet. Jonathan also lent me all five seasons of the 2004 animated series, The Batman, on DVD, and I'm planning on doing a post on that once I've finished watching it since it's a show I watched on TV when the first two seasons aired in 2004 and 2005. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.