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’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.
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.
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.
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.
I read the Jedi prince series and then the thrawn trilogy as a kid and teen. Jedi Prince does not hold up as an adult lol but was really good for my age at the time.
One thing I will say about reading EU novels is that it made hate the sequel movies when they came out for just throwing away the beloved characters instead of the expanding on them.
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.
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
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).
They are reprinting them at the moment so don’t rule it out but it’s a relatively expensive undertaking and so it’s unlikely that they’d splash out on Legends material unless they sell well. Eventually AI will bang these out I suppose.
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