The Books I Left Behind

I'm continuing to delve into the electronic detritus of my youth. There's some pretty good stuff in there (I found a hilarious schedule I made before a family road trip, making fun of how my dad was the worst at complying with my dad's planned departure times), but much of it is only funny or interesting if you are in my family. (Maybe some biographer will use it some day. I pity that person, then.)

What did I find particularly interesting was the snapshot of the reading habits of young Steve Mollmann. One file (created when I was 14, last updated when I was 16, modestly called "The Collected QUOTES AND WISDOM of S. C. Mollmann") mostly collects quotations I'd read, but includes at the front a list of "Stevil's Picks," where I list the best movies and books. Here are my favorite movies, in alphabetical order:

• The Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
• October Sky
• The Planet of the Apes
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
• Star Trek: Insurrection
• Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
• Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
• The Truman Show

Truly highbrow taste! I did not know that a younger me had loved Star Trek: Insurrection so much it was one of only two Star Trek movies to make my list of nine all-time movies. C'mon, young Steve, at least you could have gone for The Voyage Home, that's a movie whose jokes are actually funny!

My list of best books is just as perplexing. This is first in order of favorites and then alphabetical:

• 1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Far Beyond the Stars by Steve Barnes
• 2 & 3. The Winds of War and War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk
• 4. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Animorphs #19: The Departure by K. A. Applegate
• Animorphs #33: The Illusion by K. A. Applegate
• The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov
• Isaac Asimov’s Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen
• The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov
• Star Trek: New Frontier – Once Burned by Peter David
• Star Wars: X-Wing #4 – The Bacta War by Michael A. Stackpole
• Star Wars: Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly

Wow! Of my thirteen favorite books, two were middle-grade sci-fi, two were Star Wars, and three were Star Trek... and the very best book of all time was a novelization! Mind you, it is an above-average novelization, but, well, really. Many of these books I've not read since, so I don't even know if they hold up, but my guess is that almost none of them would land in my Top 13 now. (I posted this on facebook, and my aunt thought it was my best-of list now... which seemed kind of insulting, to be honest.) The Bacta War was a pretty good Star Wars book, though.

I also found my planned summer reading list from 2001, the summer I turned 16. It is grandly titled "OPERATION: OVERLORD," and apparently it was my plan to read every book I'd ever had any desire to read. I was ridiculously ambitious; it is 41 items long, and many of those items are actually multiple books, like C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, or the Dune series, or there's a single entry that just reads "Kurt Vonnegut" (I assume this means the eleven Vonnegut books handed down to me by my father). And many of the individual books are themselves hefty, like Paradise Lost.

I have a vague memory of checking some of these out of the library, but I think I got a whole two items through the list, because I've read the Space Trilogy and all three Ringworld books, but I have never read any of the later Flight Engineer installments (probably for the best; it was a cheesy sf series "co-written" by Scotty), Paradise Lost, The Great Divorce, Eon, The Green Mile, and several others on the list. Others I know I read, but only much later, like The Dark is Rising, The Aeneid, and the Horatio Hornblower books (not visible in my screenshot above, but further down the list).* I don't think it's too dissimilar from my current tastes in some ways, though, a weird mix of legitimate literature and illegitimate sf.

I also have a short-lived books I actually read from that summer. This shows that part of my problem was though I read a lot, I kept reading things not on my list (still a problem to this day). That summer I read The Bridge Over the River Kwai, two volumes of the Patlabor manga, many Star Trek books not on the above list (I used to be able to keep up with them as they were released!), my first-ever Doctor Who novels, and the first eight Left Behind novels, all one right after another. Yikes. (I think I treated them more as sf than anything else, which made it even more jarring when they contained basic scientific and technical errors. I still remember an explanation that the light of a shooting star had taken years to reach the Earth, showing an enormous lack of comprehension as to what a shooting star actually was.)

This early attempt at a reading log ran from May to August 2001; I recorded that I began Lord Jim (our summer reading junior year), but never recorded that I finished it. Across 89 days I read 44 books, a rate I no longer sustain. I suspect I wouldn't have racked up so many had I stuck with my original plan and read Gilgamesh, The Aeneid (I think I checked out Dryden's translation?), and Don Quixote. The great thing about Star Trek books is that you can read them like a rocket.

Also, Dad, The Way West was on the list. I'm sorry I never got to it.

* I doubt I even knew there was a tv show then, so I assume I just wanted to read them because of all the times I'd seen Star Trek described as "Horatio Hornblower in space."