books

Chris Knight's avatar

Yesterday I bought a copy of Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide. I’ve long been a fan of DK Publishing’s Star Wars books, which have been in the format of visual dictionaries and beautifully illustrated cutaways of locations and vehicles in the Star Wars saga.

Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide continues DK’s tradition in providing lush eye candy and detailed information, this time about a certain globe-trotting archaeologist. Written by James Luceno (who has been praised on this blog numerous times for his Star Wars work), the book covers most of the span of what we know about the life and times of Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr, beginning with the birth of his father in Scotland in 1872. Indy himself is born in 1899 and considerable space is devoted to his early exploits (which were documented in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series). The book pics up the ...

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One of the niftier gifts that I got for Christmas came from my wife Lisa: a copy of The Star Wars Vault.

If you consider yourself a serious student of the saga’s production lore, this book is a must-have for your shelf. It’s not merely a written tome: it supplements the chronicle of the development and marketing of the Star Wars movies with reproductions of several official documents (including the prospective audience members’ questionnaire for the first screening of Star Wars, George Lucas’s handwritten notes about The Empire Strikes Back and a copy of John Williams’s original composition for the first movie’s ending theme). There are also two CDs with audio material, and among them is what might be the closest thing there will ever be toward acknowledging The Star Wars Holiday Special‘s right to exist: the track of Carrie Fisher singing as Princess Leia!

2007 was ...

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It’s the one starring George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge. Many regard this as the finest version of A Christmas Carol ever filmed. I watched this the very first time it ran, waaaay back in December of 1984.

Okay, question: everyone, and I mean everyone, knows the story of A Christmas Carol. But how many people have actually read Charles Dickens’s original novel? How many of you reading this can say that you’ve gone through the whole thing?

I did, toward the end of my first semester at Elon. While in the library one night looking for something else I came across it, and was surprised at how tiny it is as a novel: not very thick at all. I checked it out and spent the rest of the night reading it. Amazingly, there are things in the original book that to the best of my knowledge have ...

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Last week the new Star Wars book Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force came out. I haven’t bought it yet but might later this afternoon (and I found these images on Wookieepedia). Within it, hauntingly painted by Chris Trevas, there is the first-ever “canon” image (meaning it’s fully approved by Lucasfilm) of Darth Plagueis. If you saw Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith then you already know that Darth Plagueis was the Sith Master who trained Darth Sidious. He was also obsessed with stopping death.

So here it is: Chris Trevas’ portrait of Darth Plagueis (watching a young Sidious spar with a lightsaber):

And here’s a close-up of the face of Plagueis:

Even though that’s just one picture, that’s still an awful lot more about Plagueis than has been released since Episode III. There was going to be a novel about Darth ...

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Look at what’s being published on January 8th, 2008!

From the creator of V himself Kenneth Johnson, and weighing-in at 448 pages, it’s V: The Second Generation.

So in case you are one of the “younger” generation (i.e. my friends younger than 20) and are wondering what V is: almost a quarter-century later it still ranks among the scariest and most disturbing things ever put on American television. And had it been better managed, it had the potential to be one of the greatest sci-fi franchises of all time.

In the spring of 1983, NBC broadcast the two-part original miniseries V. They came from a distant star: a fleet of fifty gigantic “motherships” – five miles in diameter – one for each of the largest cities on Earth. These “Visitors” – who looked human in every way – came begging for Earth’s help, claiming that their home ...

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ToyFare and Wizard Universe have compiled their list of the 50 greatest weapons throughout all of fiction. Lightsabers make the list twice (the standard design and Darth Maul’s two-bladed terror) and I was glad to see that the BFG9000 from the videogame Doom also made the cut. There are also some things mentioned here that I’d never heard of before, like Hitler’s Handgun (exactly what it sounds like, from Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange: The Oath miniseries) and some that are surprisingly obscure in this day and age (like the Target Seeking Bullet Gun from the movie Runaway). And the Tall Man’s homicidal Christmas tree balls from Phantasm (left) came in at #24. A great fun read and I’m particularly glad to see what came in at #1 🙂...

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It’s a great Star Wars book. I liked it a lot.

Just wanted to let y’all know that if you were thinking of buying it. I’ll recommend it.

Going to leave for awhile. I won’t be back unless it’s either (a) major catastrophe (b) Ron Price does something so cosmically insane that I have to step in again or (c) I’m good and ready to return… which may not be for quite some time.

So ’til then… goodbye goodbye goodbye!

EDIT 4:33 p.m. EST: My sabbatical in no way affects the eBay auction for the copy of Transformers: The Score signed by Steve Jablonsky. I’m just stepping away from the blog for awhile, not the Internet entirely. So I’ll still be monitoring this until Thursday when the auction ends 🙂...

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Okay, this one blows my mind bigtime (and it takes a hella lot to blow this mind)…

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has “outed” Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts School and Harry’s principle mentor (yeah I know how weird it looks to read that).

Not only was Dumbledore a gay man, but he had an unrequieted love for Gellert Grindelwald: his one-time accomplice in an ill-spirited bid for conquest of the wizard world, before Dumbledore came to his senses and later defeated Grindelwald during World War II.

I honestly don’t know what to make of this. It doesn’t really take away from the enjoyment of the books themselves, because this was nothing that was ever, ever a part of the story. It could be like Ridley Scott insisting years later that Deckard was himself a Replicant in the movie Blade Runner, when there was nothing indicating that ...

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James Rigney Jr. – better known by his pen-name Robert Jordan – has died in South Carolina of a rare blood disease.

Jordan was the author of the rather popular Wheel of Time series. He had finished the eleventh book in 2005 and he was working on the twelfth and final book when he passed away. I only read the first volume, The Eye of the World, and that was about 12 years ago but I remember it being a pretty great read. I may have to check out the rest of the series now, especially since a number of people have commented on some rather Christian themes throughout the books....

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