A long time ago on a bookshelf far, far away, were a significant number of StarWars books. Known as The Galactic Library, it housed a lot of the Expanded Universe stories. It’s certainly over 100 titles but I’m not sure of the exact number. I’d been reading and collecting StarWars books from primary school up until about 2003 but my interest petered out at the end of the Vuuzhan Vong story arc and the introduction of the prequel oriented canon. I’ve still got all the books and occasionally debated whether or not to re-read some of them, but I’ve erred on the side of caution. After the EU content was relegated to the “Legends” category in 2014 and a significant amount of history was re-written I didn’t have much interest in catching up, especially on events that had already been covered. The events in Truce at Bakura are, as far as I’m concerned, what took place after the Battle of Endor.
But over the past year I have picked up a few new titles, the purchases probably subconsciously driven by the development of Galaxy’s Edge and my involvement in the local StarWars: Destiny scene.
It’s widely known that Timothy Zhan’s work represents the best content from the EU era. So it should come as no surprise that his Thrawn and Thrawn: Alliances turns out to be well worth the read. Thrawn: Treason comes out later this year. If you like StarWars you should read them. The other honourable mention I’d like to make is Honour Among Thieves which is written by “James S. A. Corey”, the nom de plume for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. These two are responsible for The Expanse series which you can catch on Netflix. Actually the reason why I ended up with a copy of Honour Among Thieves is because I was ordering the first three books of The Expanse and it popped up as a recommendation. If you’ve been thinking about touching base with the StarWars universe again, this would be a good place to start. It’s well written and it’s got that genuine StarWars mana in it. Despite all the requisite cliches and familiar cues, it feels refreshing because of the hit-and-miss nature of the franchise these days. It doesn’t cost much and it doesn’t take long to read. So you may as well!
