[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Yes, the novelisation of the movie. I have the next two as well. I'm reading this to see if I actually want to read the novelisations.

And quickly abandoned. The writing wasn't brilliant, but to my surprise is
t was the casual racism about the Jawas that did it. These two paragraphs in particular:

Spoiler:

Three travesties of men scurried out from behind concealing boulders. Their motions were more indicative of rodent than humankind, and they stood little taller than the Artoo unit. When they saw that the single burst of enervating energy had immobilized the robot, they holstered their peculiar weapons. Nevertheless, they approached the listless machine cautiously, with the trepidation of hereditary cowards.

Their cloaks were thickly coated with dust and sand. Unhealthy red-yellow pupils glowed catlike from the depths of their hoods as they studied their captive. The jawas conversed in low guttural croaks and scrambled analogs of human speech. If, as anthropologists hypothesized, they had ever been human, they had long since degenerated past anything resembling the human race.

On to Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie. Astonishingly, Poirot, who retired before 1921, has survived to the late 1960s for this case. Not impossible, I suppose, but he must be in his late nineties by now.