Lately I began reading all of the Star Wars novels.
All of them.
And it's a lot.
I had dabbled in Star Wars lit before, and read a handful of the books when I was in middle school and high school. I definitely read the novelizations of the first four movies, and the between-movie pieces "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" and "Shadows of the Empire." I read three of the "Tales" collections about random creatures from the cantina, bounty hunters, and random creatures from Jabba's Palace. I think that I read "Truce at Bakura," "The Courtship of Princess Leia," and "Darksaber." I know that there are a few more, but none that stand out.
Earlier this year, I was moved to reignite my Star Wars geekdom. Part of what drew me to this was a project by Bria at Tosche Station, called "The Waru Express." She read or reread 130 Star Wars novels and posted her insights on what she read, and she made it seem manageable. I'm not sure why it is called "The Waru Express," but Wookieepedia tells me that Waru is a giant gelatinous SPACE WHALE from a book I haven't gotten to yet. I'm too afraid to research more, because spoilers.
So in April, I began what I just dubbed five seconds ago "The Waru Local to Warminster." Unlike The Waru Express, the local has a lot more stops and is significantly slower. I planned on reading all the Star Wars publications, in release order, using this list as a template. The list was a little lacking - it was missing the "Tales from..." compilations mentioned above, as well as a few other releases that I caught - and might still be missing others.
My count comes to 257 books, which might be missing a few newer releases that I'll add when I get there in ninety years. This includes all the young adult books and novelizations, which do not fit as snugly into the SW canon, but excludes the Star Wars Adventure Journals, which were full of canonical and non-canonical short stories, but which are unavailable today for anything which could be considered an acceptable price.
I decided to read in release order, as opposed to chronological order, for a few reasons. My impulse is to discover the new characters, planets, etc, as they are written, since even things that are chronologically earlier are written with this context. Also, it helps keep context straight - everything written before 1999 has the possibility of conflicting with The Phantom Menace, at which point things will fall in line. Same with 2002 for AOTC, and 2005 for ROTS, and probably to a lesser extent in 2008-2012 for The Clone Wars.
At this point, I am 20 books in - 20/257, or 7.77% of the way through my mission. Here are some brief thoughts on the books I've read.
The Star Wars Trilogy - "Star Wars" by "George Lucas," "The Empire Strikes Back" by Donald F. Glut, and "Return of the Jedi" by James Kahn.
Nothing very surprising in any of these. I'm pretty sure you've seen the movies if you're a person in the year 2013, and am certain you've seen the movies if you've bothered to venture. A few brief thoughts - the intro/prologue for "Star Wars" lays out basically the entire plot of the prequels, from what I can remember - or at least the Palpatine arc. Throughout the books, there are some details that are a bit messed-up, due to deleted/revised scenes or wonky concept art - such as a terrible Jabba the Hutt scene in "Star Wars" that doesn't fit in and certainly never should be reinserted into the movie; or lengthy descriptions of a blue Yoda gnawing on his Gimer Stick in "Empire." The only thing of note about the "Jedi" novelization is that Kahn really, REALLY likes to type out onomatopoeias of droid and alien sounds.
Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster
A chilling glimpse into what the future would hold if Star Wars hadn't made billions of dollars, this one was apparently written as a sequel that could be made on the cheap (i.e. no Harrison Ford, no outer space, nothing particularly exotic or interesting). Also features a lot prose about how super horny Luke is for Leia. That's the only long-lasting impression I have of this, a few months later.
"The Han Solo Adventures" by Brian Daley, and "The Lando Calrissian Adventures" by L. Neil Smith - 6 books total
I was prepared to dislike these books, based on what I'd heard of them, but I thought they were pretty good. Because they took place prior to the trilogy, they didn't rely on characters from the films. The Han Solo series had a few great Star Wars-y sequences, such as the attack on Stars' End. The Lando books were super-weird, including a journey through a temple that played with his size and concept of time, and a journey through the stars with some flying SPACE WHALES. Lando was the much more interesting character in these series - but the books were a lot weirder, and I'd probably favor rereading the Solo books.
"The Thrawn Trilogy" by Timothy Zahn
This has always been a series held to fairly high standards - the start of the modern Star Wars renaissance - and as such, I've been very interested in reading these. Some parts of the series are very good - anything involving the Mara Jade character, for instance; and most of the stuff involving Grand Admiral Thrawn, although his seeming omniscience got to be a bit much. What doesn't hold up particularly well about these books is the level of self-reference. Especially in the first book, "Heir to the Empire," but throughout the books, the original trilogy is referenced constantly. Characters liken everything to a situation from the movies, or make callbacks to dialogue that they, in that universe, said five years prior. In the early nineties when these were THE Star Wars books, it might have been nice, but it gets a bit old and a bit cheesy. Speaking of cheesy, there's a Jedi named Joruus C'boath, a clone of Jorus C'boath, who clones Luke using his old hand and calls him LUUKE SKYWALKER. LUUKE. LUUKE.
"The Jedi Prince" series (6 books) by Paul and Hollace Davids
These were pretty awful. Each of the six books has a small environmental message that doesn't fit into anything and doesn't go anywhere - for instance, "The Glove of Darth Vader" involves saving the space whales. MORE SPACE WHALES. The characters all hung out at Dagobah, Bespin, and Yavin IV, and the Empire set up camp on Hoth. It's like my terrible Episode VII story, which I wrote at age 8, all over again. The series involves TWO three-eyed mutant children of Emperor Palpatine (Triclops and Trioculus), and introduced the world to Chewbacca's world-famous zoochberry pies! The series did improve somewhat as it went and all the people I hated started dying, but really when it starts with a galaxy-wide search for Darth Vader's floppy old glove, it only can go up from there. Makes me regret my decision to include the younger fiction, but I'M ALREADY IN NOW.
"The Truce at Bakura" by Kathy Tyers
A book that, A, gave me a lot of hope after trudging through the six books above, and B, showed a way to calm things down a bit after the last proper novel, Zahn's "The Last Command." Not everything has to be the final battle in a massive war, and the whole fate of the universe doesn't always have to hang in the balance. I'm happy that I got a novel that played around more with character motivations, had a smaller threat (although, let's face it, an alien race threatening possible tech enslavement of mankind is still kind of major), explored new worlds, and contained an unlikely alliance between Our Heroes and the Empire.
So here I sit, 7.77% of the way done. I'm reading "The Courtship of Princess Leia" now, and I'm only 1/4 of the way through, but I have some complaints about Han's characterization, and about how the two men vying for Leia's hand disregard any agency that character has, but maybe these things will be addressed as I continue. After this, it's into the next series, "The Jedi Academy Trilogy" by Kevin J. Anderson. So far, I'm reading at my own pace and enjoying things a lot - fatigue has yet to set in. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up with blog posts, since I'm notorious for blowing stuff like this off - but here we go.
Love,
Mikey T.
