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.
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.
Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the original sequel, before they had budget. The Brian Daley Han Solo books, L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian books, and Mike Stackpole’s X-Wing books, are all pretty good. Daniel Keys Moran of The Long Run and more recently AI War/Time War fame, wrote a few short stories.
Almost everything else I ever even read a couple pages of was so awful I threw it down. These were all written long before Disney got hold of it, and nobody really cared much about canon. Modern stuff would be corporate pablum.
I very highly recommend the republic commando series by Karen Traviss. It is so well written and gives a lot of context to clones in general and commandos. Honestly some of my favorite books ever. The game is fantastic too of course.
I really like the complete High Republic series. Adult novels, young adult novels and even the middle-grade novels. Those were the first star wars books I ever read and I loved the complete setting. Also got me into comics
I also read „Catalyst: A rogue one novel“ because I love r1 and that book makes the story even better imho.
I read every Star Wars novel there was in the mid 90s. I don’t regret it. It’s cheap sci fi, in a framework of an established universe. There are some cool stories.
Unfortunately, the stuff I read now isn’t canon (I think?). I read Timothy Zahn’s and Kevin J Anderson’s series, that took place 5 and 7(12?) years after Endor.
The Adventures of Han Solo is dope as fuck, and I still use the dogfighting strategy I learned in that book when I play anything with dogfighting. Same with The Adventures of Lando Calrissian, though it gets a little funkier with the sci fi elements. There’s a whole thing with teleporting space whales talking about pooping in battle.
Tales from Jabba’s Palace, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, those are fun because they give every character in the background a backstory. All the stories intersect then go their separate ways at the moments appearing in Episodes 4 and 6. Like you learn the happy puppy love between the rancor and the guy in the hood, and it makes it sadder when you see him cry.
This is me. The Heir to the Empire trilogy is one of my favorite book series. I read every bit of the old EU I could get my hands on in the 90s. Quality definitely varies across different books and authors, but I think that era of content is worthwhile if you’re a Star Wars fan.
Any Timothy Zahn books are quite good. I love Thrawn.
iirc, in the 90’s the older books had a set of guidelines they had to adhere to, like no stories that take place before episode 4, or Luke couldn’t have sex, I don’t remember much more than that, but I think they were pretty free to tell any story if they stayed within the guidelines.
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.
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
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