Books like All Good Things...

As I write this, Easter was just three weeks ago. For some reason, this particular Easter, a particular memory of another particular Easter sprang to mind. I don't know why, but I had a good laugh with my dear old mom about it.So. It's Saturday night, April 15th, 1995. Easter Eve. My parents and I went out for the evening, like we so often did. I was a freshman in high school, not wanting to be out with Mom and Dad, but I knew that not only would we go to dinner at a restaurant (probably Applebee's or some other sports bar/family type place that had popped up all of a sudden in Toledo all over the place at the time), we would go shopping afterward. I always had a book or CD to buy (remember CD's?!), so for a 14 year old kid who couldn't drive and lived in a tiny suburb where the best I could hope for was the grocery store (long before the days of "grocery stores" having billions of items other than just food), I eagerly tagged along.Anyway, we went to Target after eating, just perusing the aisles. Under the impression that my mom had already finished her Easter shopping (more than just candy, she love to get all sorts of crap for us and everyone else in the extended family), I figured we were just doing whatever we could.In the book section, I found the novelization of the movie Stargate, and the novelization of All Good Things, Star Trek: The Next Generation's series finale that had aired almost a year prior. I was big into licesened properties, namely Star Trek, but also into movie novelizations for some reason. I really don't know why, but that was my jam at the time.So I'm carrying these two books with me, and my parents find me. Mom asks what I've got, so I show her the books. She took them and put them in her cart, and I just didn't think about it. By the time we left, she had paid for them.I didn't complain, because hey, free books. Not thinking, I didn't ask for the books when we got home. Chances are, I had been in the middle of another book at the time, and didn't feel the need to horde these on my already overstuffed bookcase.The next morning, Easter Sunday, our parents woke us up to find our Easter baskets. You read that right--my at 14, my brother at 16, and my sister home from college at 19, were woken up early on a Sunday morning to find hidden Easter baskets. Adorable.Oh yeah, the book itself.I liked it. There was a lot more in the story than they could show on the television episode. I loved how characters that were somewhat prominent on the series but hadn't been seen for a while appeared, some getting a send-off, others just kind of...there.To be honest, All Good Things wasn't the finale it could have been, and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that we knew Star Trek Generations was coming out six months after the episode. It wasn't like the last time we'd ever see these characters, although it did have a good, heartwarming feeling to it.That said, the book to me was a bit of a tease, even though I had already seen the show and the movie. I read it expecting a big, hearty GOODBYE, LOYAL FANS! from all the characters, especially those tertiary characters like Dr. Pulaski, Wesley Crusher, and several others, but instead, it ended just like the show, fully prepared to usher us into Generations, and the next couple of movies.Regardless, I enjoyed this. Maybe it was the memory of how I came to own the book, or maybe it was the nice, warm spring of 1995, a perfect end to a terrible freshmen year of high school, or maybe even something else I can't seem to recall at this moment.TL;DR:Good book. Great series. Happy Easter.