I'm planning to pick up the prequel novel. I'm hoping Alan dean foster has a clever fix for Ridley's mess. :-/
As for the covenant adaptation, I'll probably read it later too. I got my hands on the Alan dean foster alien omnibus book (alien, aliens, alien 3) a while back and I finally started reading that. It's pretty big too, but not as big as "IT" lol. I'm at the end of "alien" now.