I wanted to take a moment here to invite fellow EU fans to join me in participating in the Star Wars Action News Book Club and its subsequent SWAN BC Podcast.

What am I talking about?

Last year, Arnie and Marjorie Carvalho, two highly knowledgeable Star Wars collectors (toys, statues, you name it) started the first Star Wars podcast dedicated to the hobby of Star Wars collecting, entitled "Star Wars Action News." (TheForce.Net and Rebelscum.com's new "Force-Cast" has sort of taken up the same format recently, but SWAN was the first and remains, in my opinion, the best, with about sixty weekly episodes under their belt at this point.)

Anyway, Arnie eventually decided to get back into reading the Star Wars novels, and the idea of doing so spawned the Star Wars Action News Book Club, which then gave birth to the SWAN BC Podcast.

Basically, it works like this:

The Book Club is reading all of the Star Wars EU novels in the order that they were published (with a small exception for trilogies to keep them clumped together). They began with the novelization of "A New Hope" by Alan Dean Foster, then moved on to "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" (also by Foster), and just wraped up "Han Solo at Stars' End" by Brian Daley. The club is currently reading "Han Solo's Revenge."

For each book, there are spoiler and non-spoiler discussion threads for the books on the SWAN forums over at www.reviewstarwars.com/forums/. The books are read over the span of about three weeks. Forum members simply sign up to take part in the club for that book, then are granted access to the discussion forum for the club itself.

Once a few weeks go by, the club's organizer, Brock, then works with Arnie (the host) and me (the resident "continuity ambassador," as they call me) to set up a time for a live roundtable discussion about the book. The roundtables are handled through the online chat program "TeamSpeak," which allows for the entire roundtable to be done as an audio chat, which is then recorded.

Those recorded roundtables are then merged with some thoughts from Arnie (and often Marjorie), plus any extra material (such as an interview with Alan Dean Foster that was bundled with the ANH roundtable), and are released as podcast episodes for the Book Club. So far, the roundtables for ANH and SOTME have been released. (You can find them here and here, respectively.) The discussion for "Han Solo at Stars' End" was recently recorded and should be released later this month.

I have found the discussions quite entertaining, and it is also nice to be going back into reading the early EU novels. In fact, participating in the SWAN BC is what prompted me to finally complete my "first run" novel set by finding the original release versions of SOTME, the OT novelizations, and Han/Lando adventures, to replace my old omnibus editions. (Well, to supplement them, I guess. My OT omnibus and SOTME were signed by Foster, but still.)

I'm going to be trying to get more people invovled in the SWAN BC via ChronoRadio starting in December (when Arnie and Marjorie appear on the show) and via the Star Wars Timeline Gold (starting with a mention in its October 2006 release on Oct. 15). As ChronoRadio itself ends in May, I'm hoping that we can get some of my audience for CR to jump over to the Book Club, since I'll continue to be involved in that, possibly even picking up mixing duties to free up more regular SWAN time for Arnie.

At any rate, I've enjoyed the Book Club and the Podcast roundtables very much, and I highly encourage anyone interested in the EU, especially the early EU, to get involved as well. You don't have to be a fan of my shows or even SWAN itself to get involved. All one needs is a healthy interest in reading the EU and discussing it with a group of other thoughtful fans.

Related Links:
SWActionNews.com
SWAN on Fanworks

(I should note that registration for "Han Solo's Revenge" ends tomorrow, Oct. 2, so if you want to get in on that one, you'll want to do so quickly.)