I'm so old I can remember when we used to be able to order books at school (no bookstores and our public and school librarians hated SFF). I read the "Star Trek" series by James Blish. 12 books that were novelizations of the original series. We couldn't watch TOS in our little town at that time (three channels, no cable, pre-satellite, etc), so reading the books kept me going. I got a job as a student aide in our school library and Mrs. Warner introduced me to her favorite, Agatha Christie novels (especially Poirot). We read more than young people nowadays because we had fewer claims on our attention. My favorite "kids book" of all time is Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell, which I first read when I was in 4th grade and recently re-read as an adult. It's a great book and one that I wish more people would discover.
I'm a bit older than you, but we read many of the same books at similar ages. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Books were my great escape and have been my constant companions.
Witam ! Jestem z dalekiego kraju z Polski i prawie wszystkie te ksiązki o ,których tutaj piszecie i czytaliscie tez są w naszym kraju przetlumaczone na nasz język ..ERB uwielbiam wszystkich jego bogaterów zwlaszcza Tarzana nie uwierzycie ale własnie czytam Tarzan i Zlote Miasto , Haggard, Hovard , Doyle , Dumas , Poe i kilkadziesiat innych ( nie bedę wszystkich wymieniał )- tych autorów czytałem i sa na moich pólkach zachwycaly mnie przygody Zorro Johnstona McCulley - nikt nie wspomniał a u nas piszą ,ze to najsłynniejsza powiesc przygodowa w Stanach Zjednoczonych duzo westernów np Zane Grey , Max Brand , Seltzer ,bardzo duzo SF takich autorów jak Leinster , Randall Garrett ,Schmitz ,EE" Doc"Smith i wuelu innych to wszystko ( ok 2 tys tomów )- znajduje sie w mojej jak ja to nazywam " bibliotece domowej " ...kocham literature uwielbiam czytac a tu 7 krzyzyk nadchodzi - Pozdrawiam wszystkich milosników literatury 📚📖👍Reggie
Great memories. I remember a time, before the internet, when the easiest way to revisit a movie was to get the novelization, and if you look around, virtually every popular TV show or movie had paperback versions, even the stupid situation comedies. And quite a chunk of them appeared as comics adaptations from the Golden Age well into the present day. Maybe because I'm interested in comics media forms, I've picked up several "illustrated screenplays" over the years, which contain film stills as illustrations. The book of El Topo has a whole section of Jodorowsky lectures and interviews. There was a Clockwork Orange book that had virtually every shot of the movie interspersed with the text of the script. And there were those Star Trek "fotonovels" that were full color fumetti versions of the original series with comic book style balloons. I wish I knew what became of those books.
You are bringing back memories. We are the same age, and I was reading Avengers and Godzilla comics at the time. I also read the Alan Dean Foster Star Wars. But the books that got me hooked on reading were the D&D choose your own adventures, Doctor Who novelizations, and the Alfred Hitchcock Three Investigators mysteries. The first "proper" adult novel I ever read was Treasure Island, then I moved on to Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which turned me into a lifelong horror fan. Next came Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera. I actually read the same paperback of Frankenstein that you did! I remember getting it from a turnstyle display of paperbacks that was at the checkout of my grandmother's hair salon! It announced on the cover that it was the "complete and unexpurgated" edition. I didn't even know what that meant. But I loved it so my mother would then let me go to Walden Books at the mall and let me pick out a paperback from hell! So then I was reading Robert McCammon, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Brian Lumley. And because the Burroughs books were also available with eye-catching covers, I read all those too. And my taste has never changed either...
Will watch later after work stuff. But I it struck me again today that I realized a while back that I have no idea why or how he has a mummy in his living room/library room. It's all taken in stride as though this entirely normal. We say, "Hi, Roger!" and go on with our day like this is an everyday occurrence. (And I'm fine with that.)
Books i remember in my younger years: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Andromeda Strain, Day of the Jackel, Catcher in the Rye, all of Blish' s Trek adaptations, the Trek Log books by Foster and some if his stand alones like Bloodhype, Planet of the Apes, the three books on Trek by Whitfield and Gerrold, Ellison, comics like Marvel. DC, Warren and Heavy Metal. Just all over the map basically.❤❤❤
Michael, I taught Dracula when I was a very young teacher in the early 1980’s, and the edition that we used was exactly that edition that you still have. I still have it too-somewhere.
Born in 70 & some books I remember fondly from my childhood (ages 7-12 approx). Rats of Nimh, Chronicles of Narnia, Dr Who novelisations (Horror at Fang Rock being the standout), Charlie & the Chocolate Factory / Glass Elevator, The Star Wars novelisation & Splinter of the Minds Eye, Asterix & Tintin. From there I graduated into sci-fi, where I stayed almost exclusively for a while before branching out into older novels such as The Lost World, Dumas, Verne, I Claudius, Rider Haggard, Buchan. Call of Cthulhu introduced me to HPL when I was about 17 or 18.
Great topic! When I was a little girl, I loved my mom reading nursery rhymes to me, but in elementary school I didn't like reading children's books. The first real book I read was a small green clothbound volume of the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I was staying with my grandmother and I slept in my great-grandmother's bedroom (she had died when I was very young). When I couldn't sleep I decided to read, and the only book in her room was Poe's. I still love him and consider him my very sad and tragic friend.
Poe is great. Old children story fave was about a magic pot that made porridge by magic words that a boy started cooking porridge but forgot how to stop it. The entire village was covered with porridge.
I remember failed attempts to read full-length novels like Treasure Island, Black Beauty and Scarlet Pimpernel. Read Journey to the Center of the Earth in 4th grade (9 years old, I guess), plus we read Book of Three in Mr. Guzman's English class. Tolkien came a couple years later (my brothers had the books) but interest did not extend to my adulthood. Day of the Triffids was the next big one (strangely enough taught in Canadian schools) which let to tracking down Wyndham which led to Wells and others. Bigger bombshell was When Worlds Collide in 1972 (at 12), the first book I immediately reread after completing. June of 1973 ran across ERB, but ignored Tarzan (hated Cheeta and Boy) and grabbed At the Earth's Core. Then ran back the next day and grabbed Pellucidar. I could go on, but this is your channel!
I was born in 1967, and the first book I remember reading was a kid's version of John F Kennedy's Biography I was fascinated by the chapter on PT-109 and all the swimming they had to do to survive. Dad was in the Navy, and we were stationed in New London CT at the time and later that year he took me to the Submarine Museum where they had an exhibit on Kennedy including the elevator the Navy built so he could be lowered into submarines for tours it in spite of his bad back. It's funny that I don't remember what day it is half the time but recall things like that.
I have read Dracula over the years 6 or 7 times. I love that you gave your first time when you read Dracula. It is always nice too remember when you read one of the true horror classics. I couldn't tell you the number of editions i own of Dracula now. Thank you for doing this epsiode. It is really nice to do remembrances like this.
Fascinating! I wish I remembered my youthful reading exploits as clearly. I know a lot of Hardy Boys novels were involved. As far as I can patch together, my last summer before college must have been a whirlwind of sci-fi. This week (in theory, if not practice) it's "The Dublin Railway Murder" and "A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England", but I've been saying that for many, many weeks. A "Dracula" reread is in the mix as well. Laundry first.
Great video and topic. In the UK when I was a kid, if it wasn’t comics, it was tv annuals- these were big hardback books that came out in the months before Christmas. I remember reading a lot of tv and movie tie-in novels, Man From UNCLE, Doctor Who and the Ron Ely film got me into Doc Savage. I read some of the classics in school which didn’t really hold my attention until we read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, which I loved reading. It may have got me into the library looking for more adult books. I think I ended up leaping from that to a reading run of Joseph Wambaugh novels, which I never brought into school 😂
I was just thinking about the books that got me hooked on reading, after the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Tom Swift, but when I was still thinking I could only go to the kids section of the library. I think I was about 10. I loved the Doctor Dolittle books, the Freddy the Pig books, Island of Adventure and the other books in the Adventure series. And there was some series about mushroom people from space that I liked, which I have not been able to track down. Anyway, thanks for sharing your memories, and provoking ours! Update: Lovecraft also taught me the word "gibbous".
@@jamesholland8057 Oh, yeah, I forgot about the Rick Brant Science Adventures. I preferred those to Tom Swift. A lot of my Rick Brant memories are mixed up with my Jonny Quest memories for some reason.
This was great. I also grew up with all those Universal monster movies. We would go to Universal Studios where they had the monsters walking around, and I built almost all of those old Aurora monster model kits. The tram ride took us right past the Munsters’ house, and I couldn’t believe it was just down street from Leave It to Beaver’s house! Star Trek, of course, watching it in first run since 1967 (I came in a little late). I didn’t discover ERB until college, but yeah, you could buy them all everywhere back then, as you should be able to today! But in junior high and high school, I got a boxed set of Ray Bradbury paperbacks, and man! I was off to the races then. Great video, really took me back!
There used to be an ad in 70s comic books which advertised the full run of Tarzan paperback books. Bought as a set. I guess these were very low quality items but maybe very collectable today?
The first fiction I remember really getting into i can't remember the author. There was a little alien who flew around in a flying saucer and used only sugar for energy. He was friends with an Earth boy and the boy used to get the alien the sugar and of course they had adventures. What little kid doesn't want to fly around in a flying saucer and live on nothing but sugar? Lots of British Boys Own adventure books were everywhere then which covered a big variety of topics from football stories to science fiction, many, many Edgar Rice Burroughs clones. Got into Sherlock Holmes quite early too but more anything that portrayed that horrible, foggy, soot covered, frightening Victorian London like Spring Heeled Jack or Jack the Ripper fiction. Of course the Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett started in '84 and I was hooked.
It's odd that Effinger didn't novelize the pilot episode, "ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW." Ideally, that should've been the 1st episode in MAN THE FUGITIVE, setting up everything for the remainder. It's also too bad he didn't novelize the remainder of the TV episodes, there being a total of 14 episodes yet only 8 of them were put into prose by Effinger. I thought he generally did a good job of it, though maybe if they had gotten Alan Dean Foster to do the novelizations -- he having cranked out the 10 volumes in the STAR TREK LOG series of novelizations covering the 22 Star Trek animated episodes -- we could've been treated to all 14 of the POTA series episodes.
I think the first grown-up book I read was _The Call of the Wild._ At age ten, my home was just a couple blocks from the public library, so I could go on my own and make use of my library card.
They're great, Blish doesn't just transfer the script to a novel, he weaves in details and gives more depth to the characters (such as the loneliness of Leonard "Bones" McCoy, for example, and what drove the great James Tiberius Kirk to be Starfleet's youngest captain).
Love this video. My recollection of Planet of the Apes and Star Wars is the same for me, although I got obsessed with Star Wars when I was a 6 year old. It totally overtook my life hahaha - but then I got obsessed with TZ when I was like 11 or something....very young....but not a little kid like with Star Wars. Then our influences diverge a bit, but I can see in this video that we had parallel formative years.
Read the original novel of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by Jack Finny. It’s very different from the movie. He also wrote, “Time and Again,” one of my favorite books of all time, on time travel.
Back in the day when "any bookstore" meant Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's. As a kid my first "grown-up" book were Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton (One of these things is not like the others...). Then there was Moon of the Wolf by Leslie H. Whitten (Great cover: a werewolf peering out through foliage) and most especially a vintage hardcover of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe with wonderfully gruesome illustrations by Harry Clarke.
Vonda n mcintyre - Star trek the beginning the first Mission Michael Ende - the neverending Story 2 of my first books, still have them, still love them.
Our trajectories were quite similar, although I had a lot of Famous Monsters magazine in there. First discovered Planet of the Apes in the same terrible paperback, and now own it in the same Folio Society edition. What are the odds? 😉
I also like the same things that I liked as a youngling. I mostly only add and not subtract to my tastes. I would like to think that this means that we got it right the first time! :P
Universal's black and white monster movies have a lot to answer for, between those and Harryhausen's creations, I was bewitched. I couldn't say what books I read with any great detail, the influences were seeded by those wonderful films, the past is a fog, like you there were dinosaurs, mythology, and monster books. At some point I came across a beautiful big hardback in the library, that was Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination illustrated by Arthur Rackham with it's atmospheric colour plates. I took that out again and again for years, I own a replica copy of that edition now, one of the best accidental book finds. There were some westerns, science fiction, foxed yellowing horror anthologies with Lovecraft and fellow masters of creepy weirdness, some Conan, and one of my other vices Moorcock.
I have those paperbacks of Planet of the Apes and More Stories from the Twilight Zone on my shelves. I got the Twilight Zone from the Brattle for a $1. The Tomb was my first adult book.
Retired Australian librarian here. My last job was the home delivery coordinator for my local public library. I would select books in the format and genre that each individual housebound reader specifically wanted. Hopefully these services continue to operate. Also if you have an internet friendly device and access to the internet (again usually free at your public library) you can download free ebook copies of classics from Project Gutenberg. Long live the public library!!
My favourite Boris Karloff photo is the one were he is meeting a group of young admirers. Boris is in full creature make up and he is smiling and he has a fag in his mouth. (In England, a fag is a cigarette). The first US comics I read that featured a talking ape were the Gorilla Grodd trilogy. Given how popular Gorilla covers were It is odd that Grodd did not feature on any of those covers. Before Grodd there was a talking 'ape' who featured on the cover of 'The Topper' each week. He was not quite as sinister as Grodd. His name was Mickey the Monkey.
I think this illustrates how so many of us- myself included- come into reading genre fiction through other media: television and film grew up alongside Genre Science Fiction- Tv being invented at around the same time that Gernsback started 'Amazing Stories' and coined the term "scientifiction"- and SF film was going by this point too. Science Fiction has always been stymied as a literary genre by its having to compete with the more accessible and dumbed down TV and film adaptations, but it's an undoubted gateway. These facts underline the Modernist nature of SF, that it didn't fully arrive until we had a technological civilisation that it reflected closely. In other words, these were the kind of books that started me off as well! What larks, Michael!
Born in 1986. Also read comics first and penny dreadful stories and short story magazines. Some young adult books like famous five and some kid detectives, stuff like that. Greek myths and classic fairytales. Don’t remember what was the first adult book I have read… tried to read my mom’s books like Tarzan and Vinnetou and old school crime novels but it wasn’t working for me so I never got to Wells or Verne. I remember reading 2010 & 2063 Space Odyssey randomly. Then everything changed when I was 15 and read LOTR and Dracula.
I remember in the early 70's, as a prolific reader of comic books myself, the general worry that adults had as conventional wisdom, that children who read comic books would never move to "real" books, and would have their reading blunted and diminished. I think I can say, many thousands of books later, that that thinking was in error.
Re: movie monster books. Hey Mike. Do me a favor and Google "Crestwood Monsters series by Ian Thorne". I'm wondering if you read these when you were a kid. They were in libraries EVERYWHERE in the 70s and 80s.
Thumbnail showing a trio of creatures ... and Captain Kirk!
I'm so old I can remember when we used to be able to order books at school (no bookstores and our public and school librarians hated SFF).
I read the "Star Trek" series by James Blish. 12 books that were novelizations of the original series.
We couldn't watch TOS in our little town at that time (three channels, no cable, pre-satellite, etc), so reading the books kept me going.
I got a job as a student aide in our school library and Mrs. Warner introduced me to her favorite, Agatha Christie novels (especially Poirot).
We read more than young people nowadays because we had fewer claims on our attention.
My favorite "kids book" of all time is Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell, which I first read when I was in 4th grade and recently re-read as an adult. It's a great book and one that I wish more people would discover.
I'm a bit older than you, but we read many of the same books at similar ages. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Books were my great escape and have been my constant companions.
Witam ! Jestem z dalekiego kraju z Polski i prawie wszystkie te ksiązki o ,których tutaj piszecie i czytaliscie tez są w naszym kraju przetlumaczone na nasz język ..ERB uwielbiam wszystkich jego bogaterów zwlaszcza Tarzana nie uwierzycie ale własnie czytam Tarzan i Zlote Miasto , Haggard, Hovard , Doyle , Dumas , Poe i kilkadziesiat innych ( nie bedę wszystkich wymieniał )- tych autorów czytałem i sa na moich pólkach zachwycaly mnie przygody Zorro Johnstona McCulley - nikt nie wspomniał a u nas piszą ,ze to najsłynniejsza powiesc przygodowa w Stanach Zjednoczonych duzo westernów np Zane Grey , Max Brand , Seltzer ,bardzo duzo SF takich autorów jak Leinster , Randall Garrett ,Schmitz ,EE" Doc"Smith i wuelu innych to wszystko ( ok 2 tys tomów )- znajduje sie w mojej jak ja to nazywam " bibliotece domowej " ...kocham literature uwielbiam czytac a tu 7 krzyzyk nadchodzi - Pozdrawiam wszystkich milosników literatury 📚📖👍Reggie
Great memories. I remember a time, before the internet, when the easiest way to revisit a movie was to get the novelization, and if you look around, virtually every popular TV show or movie had paperback versions, even the stupid situation comedies. And quite a chunk of them appeared as comics adaptations from the Golden Age well into the present day.
Maybe because I'm interested in comics media forms, I've picked up several "illustrated screenplays" over the years, which contain film stills as illustrations. The book of El Topo has a whole section of Jodorowsky lectures and interviews. There was a Clockwork Orange book that had virtually every shot of the movie interspersed with the text of the script. And there were those Star Trek "fotonovels" that were full color fumetti versions of the original series with comic book style balloons. I wish I knew what became of those books.
Hello my friend! Hello!!
You are bringing back memories. We are the same age, and I was reading Avengers and Godzilla comics at the time. I also read the Alan Dean Foster Star Wars. But the books that got me hooked on reading were the D&D choose your own adventures, Doctor Who novelizations, and the Alfred Hitchcock Three Investigators mysteries. The first "proper" adult novel I ever read was Treasure Island, then I moved on to Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which turned me into a lifelong horror fan. Next came Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Phantom of the Opera. I actually read the same paperback of Frankenstein that you did! I remember getting it from a turnstyle display of paperbacks that was at the checkout of my grandmother's hair salon! It announced on the cover that it was the "complete and unexpurgated" edition. I didn't even know what that meant. But I loved it so my mother would then let me go to Walden Books at the mall and let me pick out a paperback from hell! So then I was reading Robert McCammon, Anne Rice, Stephen King, and Brian Lumley. And because the Burroughs books were also available with eye-catching covers, I read all those too. And my taste has never changed either...
Will watch later after work stuff. But I it struck me again today that I realized a while back that I have no idea why or how he has a mummy in his living room/library room. It's all taken in stride as though this entirely normal. We say, "Hi, Roger!" and go on with our day like this is an everyday occurrence. (And I'm fine with that.)
I heard somewhere that that is actually Roger's front room and that Roger is a ventriloquist.
@@PaulSaether HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Books i remember in my younger years: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Andromeda Strain, Day of the Jackel, Catcher in the Rye, all of Blish' s Trek adaptations, the Trek Log books by Foster and some if his stand alones like Bloodhype, Planet of the Apes, the three books on Trek by Whitfield and Gerrold, Ellison, comics like Marvel. DC, Warren and Heavy Metal. Just all over the map basically.❤❤❤
Michael, I taught Dracula when I was a very young teacher in the early 1980’s, and the edition that we used was exactly that edition that you still have. I still have it too-somewhere.
Also, is that little Michael in the thumbnail? Too cute! 😊
@@BookChatWithPat8668 I'm 98.0052% certain that the book cover was painted by the great James Bama. I will google it later to see if I'm correct.
@@buckocean7616 thank you! I didn’t know that.
Born in 70 & some books I remember fondly from my childhood (ages 7-12 approx).
Rats of Nimh, Chronicles of Narnia, Dr Who novelisations (Horror at Fang Rock being the standout), Charlie & the Chocolate Factory / Glass Elevator, The Star Wars novelisation & Splinter of the Minds Eye, Asterix & Tintin.
From there I graduated into sci-fi, where I stayed almost exclusively for a while before branching out into older novels such as The Lost World, Dumas, Verne, I Claudius, Rider Haggard, Buchan. Call of Cthulhu introduced me to HPL when I was about 17 or 18.
Great topic! When I was a little girl, I loved my mom reading nursery rhymes to me, but in elementary school I didn't like reading children's books. The first real book I read was a small green clothbound volume of the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I was staying with my grandmother and I slept in my great-grandmother's bedroom (she had died when I was very young). When I couldn't sleep I decided to read, and the only book in her room was Poe's. I still love him and consider him my very sad and tragic friend.
Poe is great. Old children story fave was about a magic pot that made porridge by magic words that a boy started cooking porridge but forgot how to stop it. The entire village was covered with porridge.
I remember failed attempts to read full-length novels like Treasure Island, Black Beauty and Scarlet Pimpernel. Read Journey to the Center of the Earth in 4th grade (9 years old, I guess), plus we read Book of Three in Mr. Guzman's English class. Tolkien came a couple years later (my brothers had the books) but interest did not extend to my adulthood.
Day of the Triffids was the next big one (strangely enough taught in Canadian schools) which let to tracking down Wyndham which led to Wells and others. Bigger bombshell was When Worlds Collide in 1972 (at 12), the first book I immediately reread after completing. June of 1973 ran across ERB, but ignored Tarzan (hated Cheeta and Boy) and grabbed At the Earth's Core. Then ran back the next day and grabbed Pellucidar. I could go on, but this is your channel!
I was born in 1967, and the first book I remember reading was a kid's version of John F Kennedy's Biography I was fascinated by the chapter on PT-109 and all the swimming they had to do to survive. Dad was in the Navy, and we were stationed in New London CT at the time and later that year he took me to the Submarine Museum where they had an exhibit on Kennedy including the elevator the Navy built so he could be lowered into submarines for tours it in spite of his bad back. It's funny that I don't remember what day it is half the time but recall things like that.
I have read Dracula over the years 6 or 7 times. I love that you gave your first time when you read Dracula. It is always nice too remember when you read one of the true horror classics. I couldn't tell you the number of editions i own of Dracula now. Thank you for doing this epsiode. It is really nice to do remembrances like this.
Fascinating! I wish I remembered my youthful reading exploits as clearly. I know a lot of Hardy Boys novels were involved. As far as I can patch together, my last summer before college must have been a whirlwind of sci-fi. This week (in theory, if not practice) it's "The Dublin Railway Murder" and "A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England", but I've been saying that for many, many weeks. A "Dracula" reread is in the mix as well. Laundry first.
First book I ever owned Bobbsey Twins at the Seaside. Then I got Black Beauty, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi, Five Little Peppers.
Great video and topic. In the UK when I was a kid, if it wasn’t comics, it was tv annuals- these were big hardback books that came out in the months before Christmas. I remember reading a lot of tv and movie tie-in novels, Man From UNCLE, Doctor Who and the Ron Ely film got me into Doc Savage. I read some of the classics in school which didn’t really hold my attention until we read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, which I loved reading. It may have got me into the library looking for more adult books. I think I ended up leaping from that to a reading run of Joseph Wambaugh novels, which I never brought into school 😂
I was just thinking about the books that got me hooked on reading, after the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and Tom Swift, but when I was still thinking I could only go to the kids section of the library. I think I was about 10. I loved the Doctor Dolittle books, the Freddy the Pig books, Island of Adventure and the other books in the Adventure series. And there was some series about mushroom people from space that I liked, which I have not been able to track down. Anyway, thanks for sharing your memories, and provoking ours! Update: Lovecraft also taught me the word "gibbous".
At 11 couldn’t get enough Hardys and Rick Brant stories.
@@jamesholland8057 Oh, yeah, I forgot about the Rick Brant Science Adventures. I preferred those to Tom Swift. A lot of my Rick Brant memories are mixed up with my Jonny Quest memories for some reason.
@ yeah. Jonny Quest is very similar.
That mushroom people book may have been a late 60s Scholastic book.
@@Sassacadassa65 Very possible. I know I was a great customer of theirs in grade school.
This was great. I also grew up with all those Universal monster movies. We would go to Universal Studios where they had the monsters walking around, and I built almost all of those old Aurora monster model kits. The tram ride took us right past the Munsters’ house, and I couldn’t believe it was just down street from Leave It to Beaver’s house! Star Trek, of course, watching it in first run since 1967 (I came in a little late). I didn’t discover ERB until college, but yeah, you could buy them all everywhere back then, as you should be able to today! But in junior high and high school, I got a boxed set of Ray Bradbury paperbacks, and man! I was off to the races then. Great video, really took me back!
Universal was king for monster movies.
There used to be an ad in 70s comic books which advertised the full run of Tarzan paperback books.
Bought as a set.
I guess these were very low quality items but maybe very collectable today?
The first fiction I remember really getting into i can't remember the author. There was a little alien who flew around in a flying saucer and used only sugar for energy. He was friends with an Earth boy and the boy used to get the alien the sugar and of course they had adventures. What little kid doesn't want to fly around in a flying saucer and live on nothing but sugar? Lots of British Boys Own adventure books were everywhere then which covered a big variety of topics from football stories to science fiction, many, many Edgar Rice Burroughs clones. Got into Sherlock Holmes quite early too but more anything that portrayed that horrible, foggy, soot covered, frightening Victorian London like Spring Heeled Jack or Jack the Ripper fiction. Of course the Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett started in '84 and I was hooked.
You’re right Michael, “Spock Must Die” did suck.
It's odd that Effinger didn't novelize the pilot episode, "ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW." Ideally, that should've been the 1st episode in MAN THE FUGITIVE, setting up everything for the remainder. It's also too bad he didn't novelize the remainder of the TV episodes, there being a total of 14 episodes yet only 8 of them were put into prose by Effinger. I thought he generally did a good job of it, though maybe if they had gotten Alan Dean Foster to do the novelizations -- he having cranked out the 10 volumes in the STAR TREK LOG series of novelizations covering the 22 Star Trek animated episodes -- we could've been treated to all 14 of the POTA series episodes.
I think the first grown-up book I read was _The Call of the Wild._
At age ten, my home was just a couple blocks from the public library, so I could go on my own and make use of my library card.
I'm getting into Star Trek through the books. Gonna start reading the James Blish adaptations this month!
They're great, Blish doesn't just transfer the script to a novel, he weaves in details and gives more depth to the characters (such as the loneliness of Leonard "Bones" McCoy, for example, and what drove the great James Tiberius Kirk to be Starfleet's youngest captain).
Love this video. My recollection of Planet of the Apes and Star Wars is the same for me, although I got obsessed with Star Wars when I was a 6 year old. It totally overtook my life hahaha - but then I got obsessed with TZ when I was like 11 or something....very young....but not a little kid like with Star Wars. Then our influences diverge a bit, but I can see in this video that we had parallel formative years.
Read the original novel of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” by Jack Finny. It’s very different from the movie. He also wrote, “Time and Again,” one of my favorite books of all time, on time travel.
Love the video, as always!
Back in the day when "any bookstore" meant Waldenbooks and B. Dalton's. As a kid my first "grown-up" book were Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton (One of these things is not like the others...). Then there was Moon of the Wolf by Leslie H. Whitten (Great cover: a werewolf peering out through foliage) and most especially a vintage hardcover of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe with wonderfully gruesome illustrations by Harry Clarke.
Star Wars. Now there’s a book I’ve read many times.
Snap...I was typing Curious George just as you said it.
My first at 10 was Sands of Mars Arthur C. Clarke and read every comic or Mad magazine I could find.
Vonda n mcintyre - Star trek the beginning the first Mission
Michael Ende - the neverending Story
2 of my first books, still have them, still love them.
Our trajectories were quite similar, although I had a lot of Famous Monsters magazine in there. First discovered Planet of the Apes in the same terrible paperback, and now own it in the same Folio Society edition. What are the odds? 😉
I also like the same things that I liked as a youngling. I mostly only add and not subtract to my tastes.
I would like to think that this means that we got it right the first time! :P
I was really into Planet of the Apes around the same time. Interestingly, George Alec Effinger went on to write a great cyberpunk trilogy.
Universal's black and white monster movies have a lot to answer for, between those and Harryhausen's creations, I was bewitched. I couldn't say what books I read with any great detail, the influences were seeded by those wonderful films, the past is a fog, like you there were dinosaurs, mythology, and monster books. At some point I came across a beautiful big hardback in the library, that was Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination illustrated by Arthur Rackham with it's atmospheric colour plates. I took that out again and again for years, I own a replica copy of that edition now, one of the best accidental book finds. There were some westerns, science fiction, foxed yellowing horror anthologies with Lovecraft and fellow masters of creepy weirdness, some Conan, and one of my other vices Moorcock.
I have those paperbacks of Planet of the Apes and More Stories from the Twilight Zone on my shelves. I got the Twilight Zone from the Brattle for a $1.
The Tomb was my first adult book.
Retired Australian librarian here. My last job was the home delivery coordinator for my local public library. I would select books in the format and genre that each individual housebound reader specifically wanted. Hopefully these services continue to operate. Also if you have an internet friendly device and access to the internet (again usually free at your public library) you can download free ebook copies of classics from Project Gutenberg.
Long live the public library!!
Thanks for sharing your journey. Well done.
My favourite Boris Karloff photo is the one were he is meeting a group of young admirers.
Boris is in full creature make up and he is smiling and he has a fag in his mouth.
(In England, a fag is a cigarette).
The first US comics I read that featured a talking ape were the Gorilla Grodd trilogy.
Given how popular Gorilla covers were It is odd that Grodd did not feature on any of those covers.
Before Grodd there was a talking 'ape' who featured on the cover of 'The Topper' each week.
He was not quite as sinister as Grodd.
His name was Mickey the Monkey.
"he has a fag in his mouth.
(In England, a fag is a cigarette)."
Thank you for making that clear, the image conjured up otherwise is very different.
I think this illustrates how so many of us- myself included- come into reading genre fiction through other media: television and film grew up alongside Genre Science Fiction- Tv being invented at around the same time that Gernsback started 'Amazing Stories' and coined the term "scientifiction"- and SF film was going by this point too. Science Fiction has always been stymied as a literary genre by its having to compete with the more accessible and dumbed down TV and film adaptations, but it's an undoubted gateway. These facts underline the Modernist nature of SF, that it didn't fully arrive until we had a technological civilisation that it reflected closely. In other words, these were the kind of books that started me off as well! What larks, Michael!
We just learned great insight about you.
Sgt. Rock and Jonah Hex were the best! I also liked The Born Losers and The Haunted Tank.
and led to the bone chilling horror of becoming an Influencer!!!
HA!
@@szaggasd ha! I doubt I would qualify.
Very first book (after Dick and Jane) from library...Curious George.
The Frog and Toad books are fantastic!
The first ever adult book I read as a kid was A Time To Kill by John Grisham
When I?
Was in seventh grade a friend of mine.Read me the player at the apes book and I was fascinated
Born in 1986.
Also read comics first and penny dreadful stories and short story magazines. Some young adult books like famous five and some kid detectives, stuff like that. Greek myths and classic fairytales. Don’t remember what was the first adult book I have read… tried to read my mom’s books like Tarzan and Vinnetou and old school crime novels but it wasn’t working for me so I never got to Wells or Verne. I remember reading 2010 & 2063 Space Odyssey randomly. Then everything changed when I was 15 and read LOTR and Dracula.
Awesome video!
@@jamesholder13 thanks
I remember in the early 70's, as a prolific reader of comic books myself, the general worry that adults had as conventional wisdom, that children who read comic books would never move to "real" books, and would have their reading blunted and diminished. I think I can say, many thousands of books later, that that thinking was in error.
Re: movie monster books.
Hey Mike. Do me a favor and Google "Crestwood Monsters series by Ian Thorne". I'm wondering if you read these when you were a kid. They were in libraries EVERYWHERE in the 70s and 80s.
@@Steve-wo7gt oh, I know those books well!
I have the exact same edition of Planet of the Apes that my dad got as a kid (wouldn't surprise me if he stole it from a library, haha)
Frog and Toad were not friends. It was all a lie, a lie, I tell you.
More like frenemies
😊
Do you read modern books or only classic books?
@@Delta45566 I don’t read many modern books, honestly.
@michaelk.vaughan8617 If one day you are interested in reading modern books, I recommend you two authors Brandon Sanderson and George R.R Martin.
Almuric is fantastic, I like it more than his Conan adventures. Is that booktube blasphemy?
Yes. Yes, it is. 😀
@@DDB168 ha! Yes!