Lit How Old Were You When You Began Reading Star Wars Books?

4 or 5 I think. Started with a young reader book about Han Solo (Rebel Hero or something I think), then was reading Jedi Apprentice shortly thereafter.

 

Watched the movies and played the games only until I was about 12, then I started delving into the EU books. Fondly remember the Galaxy of Fear books as one of my starting points.

 

Isn't it funny, you can remember reading a whole bunch of books and thinking "no that was definitely the first one I read" and the timelines never seem to match up - so like for me with thinking Hear to the Empire/Galaxy of the Fear were definitely the first I read, then thinking about all the other books out around the same time that I read that I may well have read first.

 

Y'know, I have vivid memories of when that book came out, and I couldn't understand why Luke had shaved all his hair off on the cover.

I don't think I read it for ages, until after I read the X-Wing books, and even then I struggled with the first person perspective until I was a bit older.

 

I watched the Star Wars trilogy for the first time in '96, when I was ten, after my parents' friends lent us the '95 VHS releases (the ones where each cover had half a character's face. I still love those covers). It didn't take my brother and I long to start eating up more SW media, like Rebel Assault II and Dark Forces for the Playstation, and Shadows of the Empire for the N64 (a console we didn't own but at the local video game store you could pay a buck to play any game for fifteen minutes). The Shadows junior novelization would have been the first book I read, even though I could have easily devoured the regular novelization at that age. Turned out the junior novelization was largely just an abridged version of Steve Perry's original, with some of the prose rewritten for a younger audience. And it prevented years of confusion on my part by outright stating 'Prince Xizor (pronounced "SHEE-zor")' on the first page.

Our hunger for more SW was only stoked by the Special Editions, and in '97 I think I read Tales from Jabba's Palace and the novelizations of each OT film. Maybe Splinter, too... mostly just stuff set in and around the trilogy. Didn't venture into post-ROTJ territory for another couple of years. Finished the New Republic era at the end of high school and then dug into the NJO.

 

I was about 10, I remember there being a reading session in English class at school and we were told to pick one book from the library and read it in class. I didn't realise it at the time but the book was part of the Jedi Apprentice series (to this day I only remember the cover) all I knew it was star wars and I'd recently seen the prequels so I was like..."Why not"

I wouldn't start reading star wars books regularly until a few years later when TCW tie ins started being released. Even then it was only casualy.

It was A New Dawn when I was 17 that REALLY got me into star wars books.

I'm still searching to this day for that original Jedi Apprentice book. I can't remember much of the plot except that Obi and Qui Gon are guests of some hunting aristocracy family and there's a twist later in the book where one of the daughters did something with the pet "hunting dogs" Anyone know which book this was?

 

Yep! And the more I thought about it, I realized there are actually two more candidates for my first Star Wars reading material. The first was an amazingly beat-up copy of Marvel Star Wars #17 (the issue with a flashback to an adventure Luke had on Tatooine with Biggs) that I was given by a friend in my kindergarten class, and the second was this oddity:



Which is not a Star Wars story per se, but surely counts.

I'm certain, though, that it was those still photos from the ANH novelization that originally drew me in, long before I was able to actually read the book.

 

I think I was somewhere in my teens when I got into Star Wars and tried to read everything I could get my hands on. The Thrawn trilogy of course and then I branched out into just about every Bantam book. I was still pretty young since I remember the YJK books were still being published and their quality didn't bother me much at the time. Now I can recognize what age group they were aiming for (much less the Junior Jedi Knight series), but I still remember when I was eagerly waiting more books in that series.

Those previews in the back of the Bantam books helped me to keep track of what was going on. Although the occasional references to stuff outside of the novels threw for a bit of a loop, at least until I got into reading the comics too.

 

I'll expand on my story a bit more. I used to rent one of the Star Wars OT movies every week to watch Saturday morning. When I was about 10 I received the OT on VHS. This would have been about the same time that I discovered The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels in my local bookstore. I didn't like to read at that age, in fact I didn't score well in reading/writing in my early school days. Even though TEGV&V could be somewhat technical reading, the pictures and schematics had me absolutely enthralled with it and I would go and read pages of that book all the time at the store. It turned out I just needed something that interested me to read about, and I eventually saved up enough money to buy it, and I can remember reading it in the back seat of our family's vehicle when we traveled. I didn't know it at the time, but it was perhaps the perfect book for a child who would become an engineer later in life.

We would walk by the same bookstore frequently and I would see the book cover for Wedge's Gamble on the main display at the entrance to the store. I loved that cover, it really captured my imagination and spawned all these ideas about other adventure in the Star Wars galaxy. But the thought of reading a 300 page book filled exclusively with words seemed like work to me at the time. Two years later, when I was 12, Cheerios had a marketing campaign on their cereal box, where if you cut out and mailed in a coupon on the back on the box, they would send you a copy of Shadows of the Empire. I didn't really want to read it as novels still seemed like work, but it was free, and it was Star Wras, so my mom helped me mail the coupon and sure enough the novel showed up a few weeks later. I started to read it, and was instantly hooked. My mom was thrilled, her son who hated reading was reading for entertainment, and adult novels no less, she couldn't believe it haha.

From there I went through my local library's collection of Star Wars novels, this included the Thrawn Trilogy, Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy, Corellian Trilogy, Solo and Carlrissian novels, and a few others. I bought a few books in between but didn't have the allowance to get many.

Now in high school, I was buying books to read every month, including the beginning of the New Jedi Order and other Essential Guides. Around the age of 18 I found a milk crate full of Star Wars novels at a garage sale. I went through them and bought one or two that I hadn't read. When I got home my still developing OCD would urge me to go back and buy the whole crate because a lot of those books were the ones I had read from the library, and didn't have in my personnel collection, so I did. This really kick-started my Star Wars book collection.

I would continue reading Star Wars novels throughout my university years, and when I was earning decent money working in the summer one year I bough the 15 or so novels that I had read but weren't yet in my collection. I put all 80 or so novels I now had on display in my bedroom at home.

I usually read for about an hour in bed before I slept every night. There was about 2 years after university where I didn't read at all, but shortly before I met my wife I started reading Star Wars again, and started ordering all the novels I hadn't read, and read through them at a brisk pace. This turned out for the better, as I ordered the last of the Legends novels shortly before Disney bought the franchise and re-branded the covers. I finished my last Legends novel about a year after the re-branding, and have been keeping up with the new canon releases since. As the adult novels haven't been enough to keep me busy recently, I've even ventured into some young adult and young readers novels in the new canon, as well as reading some non-Star Wars books for the first time on topics that also interest me.

I firmly believe that reading all these Star Wars books is the reason I am a very capable writer. I've been told the best at my company, and so it's paid certain dividends. It's been quite a journey, and I'm very proud of my Star Wars book collection. I hope my children will read them some day, and perhaps I will re-read them as well.

 

13-14. In late elementary school and starting middle school. First book I believe I got of the EU was Darth Bane dynasty of evil.

 

The TPM Visual Dictionary.

 

I was probably 8 or 9. I first saw Star Wars when I was 7 and later got the '95 VHS box set for my birthday or Christmas later that year. I pretty quickly moved on to some of the ancillary material.

I recall first, I think, getting the Glove of Darth Vader series. I don't recall disliking them at the time. You may laugh, but they were kind of my "Thrawn trilogy" for a while. I remember also seeing the Galaxy of Fear books in a hobby shop my dad went to sometimes when I tagged along. I would read through those while he played whatever tabletop game.

I got some of the adult novels probably a little too young for my enjoyment. I had that problem a lot as a kid. I could read stuff well above my grade level, but I didn't always enjoy stuff that wasn't written for my actual maturity level. Shadows of the Empire and The Truce of Bakura were ones that just kind of sat on my bookshelf unread for a while. I did get the SotE junior novel, though, and enjoyed that. I also had the first and fourth X-Wing books for a while before I finally read them.

I really started tearing into the adult novels in 8th grade, I think. This mainly had more to do with having an allowance that allowed me to start buying everything after RotJ. I stayed pretty current with everything until I graduated from high school where I found myself having not as much time to just read everything with Star Wars in the title. I stayed mostly out of the EU from that point until the launch of the DisneyEU.

 

Whenever Traitor & Destiny's Way came out (I had been "following" what happened in the books via online book reviews before, but when I heard about Traitor I decided to officially start buying the books as well as register here). So 12-13 years old.

 

12, the Jedi Academy trilogy. Pretty soon thereafter, a bought a bunch of other books, from Truce at Bakura and Planet of Twilight to the X-wing series, the Thrawn trilogy, and both Han Solo-themed trilogies.

 

The ghost written Star Wars novel by Alan Dean Foster when I was around 8 or 9.

 

13, the Bane trilogy.

 

I think in was about 13. I won some book tokens in a school competition and I bought The Truce at Bakura and the first two books of the Corellian Trilogy. I quickly followed these up with Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

 

I was 11, and it was called STAR WARS, from the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, soon to be a major motion picture!

 

Sounds like a cool idea for a movie. When's it coming out?

 

I bet it will turn out to be one of those silly one-off things that will soon be forgotten.

 

I think around 9 or 10. Whenever the paperback for Heir to the Empire was released.

--Adm. Nick

 

I didn't read the standard novels until I was 16. Started with Labyrinth of Evil. I read a YA novel or two in my early teens.

 

Eleven.

Books are actually how I got into Star Wars. My aunt one Christmas offered me the Incredible Cross Sections book, thinking that surely this was my kind of thing. Unknown to her, I'd actually never seen a Star Wars movie, but that guide piqued my curiosity and that was soon remedied. And then the following summer, The Phantom Menace came out, so that was nicely timed.

When I started reading Star Wars novels - that same summer, Dark Apprentice by Kevin J. Anderson which one of my cousins had brought down to the beach.

 

7 or 8 I had just gotten into the movies my cousin was a massive Star Wars fan so she hooked me up with a few books dark saber and truce at bakura as well as a few action figures from the first batch of releases

The books got me even more hooked and then came episode 1