^I resisted declaring a major until my third year of college, because I just wanted to learn for its own sake, rather than as a means toward a career.
Just curious what was your first Trek novel to read?
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The first Trek novel I remember reading is The Entropy Effect.
I also love intellectual engagement and learning purely for its own sake. I'm grateful that my major was in a multi-disciplinary media studies program that incorporated skills courses as well as huge doses of social sciences and humanities, including applied ethics (yes, a subset of philosophy), which all served to broaden one's horizons and build critical thinking skills.
The experience also showed me that popular culture is just as worthy of critical inquiry as "high culture" is. I see no real reason to limit students' chosen reading material for general English and Language Arts classes to literary classics (whatever those may be).
Kor
The experience also showed me that popular culture is just as worthy of critical inquiry as "high culture" is. I see no real reason to limit students' chosen reading material for general English and Language Arts classes to literary classics (whatever those may be).
Kor
The first one I read was the novelization of Wrath of Khan.
I think it was Q Squared
The Murdered Sun, which was one of the numbered Voyager novels. I loved that book. I was 14 when it came out and I can't count how many times i read it.
Q-Space by our own Greg Cox. I think I was 12. I know I've told this story before, but it was my first experience with Star Trek anything. The cover caught my eye. I think it was seriously the second adult bookvaok I'd ever read after Orion by Ben Bova. Before that it had all been Goosebumps and Animorphs.
Since we're counting novelisations here, the novelisation of "Encounter at Farpoint" would've been the first Star Trek prose I read. I read Timetrap (the first wholly original ST novel I bought) and Memory Prime (signed out of my junior high library) shortly after that.
As long as we're talking about education experiences, too, this was around the time I started sneaking ST references into essays for school.
I included the concept of IDIC in more than one paper and referenced numerous things I'd picked up from Star Trek episodes or novels by simply attributing the writer but not the source...no Google at the time to get me found out, so I just came off as a voracious reader of obscure works beyond the teachers' ken. 
As long as we're talking about education experiences, too, this was around the time I started sneaking ST references into essays for school.
I included the concept of IDIC in more than one paper and referenced numerous things I'd picked up from Star Trek episodes or novels by simply attributing the writer but not the source...no Google at the time to get me found out, so I just came off as a voracious reader of obscure works beyond the teachers' ken. 
Mine was Star Trek 4 by James Blish, if that counts as a novel. That was in 1971, and I had found it on one of those spinny paperback racks at a Buddies supermarket. Immediately, with the first page, I was in love. Then came Spock Must Die. Then, every other Blish adaptation. I still have (and still love) those books.
I had read the Whitman children's hardback Star Trek: Mission to Horatius in 1969, right around the time of Apollo 11.
Lora
I had read the Whitman children's hardback Star Trek: Mission to Horatius in 1969, right around the time of Apollo 11.
Lora
Hard to recall exactly which one was first, as I used to borrow them from local libraries when I was young, but I think it was Faces of Fire by Michael Jan Friedman. I remember enjoying it at the time, but now I have no recollection of the plot at all.
I believe that's the one that had Kirk and McCoy visit Carol Marcus and the young David on a colony that was attacked by Klingons, coincidentally including a young Kruge. It had Kirk discover that David was his son. It also involved a conflict between two Klingon factions, the Kamorh'dag and the Gevish'rae, that I think were intended to represent smooth-headed and ridge-headed Klingons respectively, although that was never stated overtly (which I've always suspected was because of Richard Arnold-era continuity restrictions).
(This is a pretty strong misapprehension of philosophy, though. It's literally applied logic, just to metaphysical concepts; ensuring that conclusions truly do follow from presumptions, and seeing if there are any unintended, unrealized, and undesired further logical consequences from certain presumptions that suggest they should be discarded as true. Science literally wouldn't exist if it wasn't for philosophy.)
I would argue that one can get a better grasp of formal logic in high school geometry.
Cannot recall but did buy the books in the late 80's my fav is Vulcan's Glory and The Vulcan Academy Murders
I went through a big John Wyndham phase one semester in high school: The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes, etc. Eventually, one of my English teachers did request that I submit a book report on something written by somebody else--which did not seem an unreasonable request.
That wasn't an elitist thing. That was a "Enough with the same damn author" thing.
That wasn't an elitist thing. That was a "Enough with the same damn author" thing.
By Robert Vardeman, if I remember correctly. Not sure if I ever read it, because his earlier novel, The Klingon Gambit, was a first for me -- the first time in my life I threw a book across the room in disgust. A truly awful story that put me off Vardeman's work for good. I still shudder, 35 years later...
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