I feel like it will be bad because authors won’t have freedom to make things their way.
Should I spend my time reading it or look for a long series of a single author?
I always thought Timothy Zahn was an above average author, and to wrote more than a dozen of them.
Absolutely. I highly recommend both canon Thrawn trilogies by Timothy Zahn.
Seconded. If you’re open to it the older/non-canon audio book is amazing way to experience the story as well. Includes musical cues, sound effects, and the narrator does an incredible job of imitating the OG cast.
Maybe? There are a lot of them and the quality varies depending on the book. You can’t go wrong with the original Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and Last Command were considered the unofficial sequel trilogy by some fans and they started off the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, which got rebranded to the Legends continuity when Disney took over. Besides the Thrawn Trilogy, I’d also recommend the Revenge of the Sith novelization. I went in not expecting much, but it really expands on a lot of things the movie brushes over, and witnessing Anakin’s story from his viewpoint was a lot more compelling than what we got in the movie. From there, it really depends on what you want to read about.
The Star Wars book finder is a neat tool that lets you search by author, topic, or genre if you’re looking for something specific.ROTS novelization was dope. It expands every aspect of the story in such a cool way.
I read several of the Rogue Squadron books while on a long vacation and enjoyed them a lot, but they weren’t anything life changing.
I only ever read the Thrawn trilogy and they were decent.
99% Invisible had a mini-episode about movie novelizations. I think the Star Wars novelizations were mentioned in it, and the whole thing was rather interesting. Particularly where the author has limited info and has to guess about what might happen in the movie.
I’ve enjoyed dozens of them over the course of my twenty something years being into SW. Currently I’d recommend the Plagueis, Tarkin, the Thrawn books, and the Bane trilogy. Apparently I like villain books. I’ve also enjoyed the Karen Traviss Clone Trooper books but they got cancelled for canon reasons due to the TCW series.
Authors have plenty of freedom unless you’re talking about novelizations of the films.
Apparently I like villain books.
I joked to a friend that a disproportionate number of my Star Wars books have “Darth” in the title.
They aren’t going to change you view on life, but most are pretty solid. I highly recommend pretty much any books in the High Republic era, particularly “Light of the Jedi”. It’s the first of the new era and it’s a great introduction to the setting. It’s all set a few hundred years before the movies, so the Authors were able to pretty much do whatever they wanted within the basic Star Wars universe.
I’ve read a few over the years and always enjoyed them. They’re never amazing or anything imo, I’ve never run into one that knocked it out of the park or anything, but I’m not a huge Star Wars fan anyway.
But they also kinda get a baseline level of decent worldbuilding and natural conflict that keeps them from being dull or anything.
If I was, say, in an airport and needed to buy a book, it’s exactly what I would reach for if I saw it. Favorite was the one that followed and explained Mace Windu.
I remember reading Timothy Zahn as a teen and not being able to put the books down. Tbh I think his plotlines are better than the movies.
Being a star wars fan and avid reader I felt like I should give them a try, did some research and the consensus seemed to be that the thawn trilogy was the best, read book one and hated it for how one-dimensional the characters were, nothing at all noteworthy from a literary perspective
Yes, I recommend the 501st series iirc the first book is called 501 hard contact. Sadly the series was never finished but it is still worth the read.
Definitely this - they’re some of the best military science-fiction and, along with The Clone Wars series, give Order 66 a lot of added weight.
I feel like it will be bad because authors won’t have freedom to make things their way.
The series both disproves and proves this statement - Karen Traviss definitely had the freedom to make things her own way until she didn’t. She stopped writing because she didn’t feel she could make it work with the new status quo (although I think if you squint a bit and lean into the “legends” idea, that these are legends which may have happened from a certain point of view even if all the details may not be correct, it can still work, at least for me).
This is one of the books they should should have recorded audio books for.
- Do you enjoy reading them?
- Then Yes.
The Expanded Universe was always enjoyable to read, maybe not the greatest works of literature ever, but you got to see how life was progressing post-Return of the Jedi, you got to see how Luke, Leia, and Han’s family and friends lived and died.
There were some pretty good authors involved over the years too, like R. A. Salvatore, Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Stackpole, Karen Travis, William C. Dietz, Kathy Tyers, among many others. If you read any other seriailized series like the D&D novels, Battletech/Mechwarrior, Star Trek, Warhammer, and all of the many others that exist, you will probably recognize some of the authors as writers in those series as well.
As for the Prequel books and other novels post cancelation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe there was some quality improvement per novel as the universe became more definitive and more in line with the cinematic universe.
As a lifelong Star Wars fan who read the EU books for around twenty years, I’ll say I miss the version of Star Wars they were building, it wasn’t always the heroes winning the day, there was plenty of heartbreak and betrayals to go around, but it was familiar and enjoyable.
Lando Calrissian and the Mindsharp of Sharu is basically Shakespeare
