(Bi)Weekly Reading Recap (Fortnight of May 22, 2023)
This one is a lot about Star Wars Legends and Kesha.
It’s been two weeks. My don’t-call-it-a-reading-slump meant I didn’t really finish any books by the end of last week and so I waited until I had a more substantial update to publish a recap. And it was a Disney Star Wars book (that I didn’t particularly love) that broke me out of that… period of time of less reading than normal. The book was Thrawn, the first in Timothy Zahn’s Disney regime Thrawn trilogy, more about it below. But it also got me thinking a bit about my misspent youth of reading Star Wars books.
I got a request on my May reading recap TikTok for Star Wars books recommendations, so here are my thoughts (you can also find this in video form here).
Caveat: my recommendations are only for what these days are called Star Wars “Legends” but in my day we just called the Star Wars Expanded Universe, or simply The EU. I’ve highlighted a few books and series that I think are either excellent or necessary reading in the image above. As the timeline is confusing, I have made my annotations also confusing. The lists below are more clear. Happy reading!
The Essentials
The Thrawn Trilogy: started everything, read these first.
The X-Wing novels (particularly the first four): if you like the military aspects of the Thrawn trilogy and/or want to see how the New Republic really got started and how the conflict between the New Republic and the fractured Imperial Remnant unfolded.
The Hand of Thrawn Duology: these closed out the “Bantam” era of Star Wars books (really well) and handed off things into the long running series under Del Ray and Lucasbooks that started with The New Jedi Order.
Shatterpoint: fascinating character study of Mace Windu, lots to say about war, deep philosophical dive into the Force, it’s Jedi Apocalypse Now.
The Dark Lord Trilogy (Labyrinth of Evil/ROTS novelization/Dark Lord): these come packaged as a single book/Kindle ebook and are essential prequel books that are the definitive word on the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader.
The Darth Bane books: travel 1,000 years into the past and see the beginnings of the Sith Order that would culminate in Darth Sidious.
Also Good
Darth Plagueis: a bit of a misnomer as this is mostly about the rise of Palpatine. Particularly good if you’re interested in the politics of Star Wars.
Republic Commando: boots on the ground series set during the Clone Wars.
The Han Solo Trilogy: a fun series that I think rivals Solo for an origin story for Han. Includes his first romance.
I, Jedi: a retelling of the bad Jedi Academy trilogy from the perspective of one of the pilots from the X-Wing series that we suddenly decided had the Force and would be a Jedi and was inserted into a series that came out before he was invented. It’s fun, trust me.
The Corellian trilogy: not to be confused with the Han Solo trilogy, these three books take place when Han and Leia’s kids are just about to start their Jedi training when a plot involving a character from Han’s past (that you will learn a little bit about in the Han Solo trilogy and will end up being a significant character in the NJO and post-NJO eras) puts the entire family into mortal danger. This trilogy also establishes an important location: Centerpoint station.
Not Good, but Necessary to Understand What’s Going On
The Jedi Academy trilogy: I have this in yellow above (which is confusing, sorry). It’s yellow because it’s important to read, not because it’s any good at all. This series chronicles Luke Skywalker’s early days of establishing a Jedi academy, how it all went wrong, and also a bunch of characters who will be important throughout these books. Kyp Durron is terrible and has to be redeemed by future authors. Read this before you do I, Jedi (or don’t, I’m not your parent).
Rogue Planet: A weird book about one of Obi-Wan and Anakin’s first adventures. Important if you are going to continue with the NJO era.
Once you’ve tackled these books, you can fill in with anything you’re interested by, or you can move on to the Del Ray/Lucasbooks era series The New Jedi Order (NJO). This series takes place after Han and Leia’s kids after completed “Jedi preschool” and are becoming apprentices.
All of the characters we’ve come to know and love must confront an invasion from outside the galaxy by a ruthless civilization of aliens who use biological technology that confounds the forces of the GFFA1 and on top of that: they are completely disconnected from and unaffected by the Force. Main characters from the past decade of books and the movies will not survive.
For the NJO (and the series that take place afterwards), you just have to read them straight through in order. They were a publishing event in the SW EU reader communities online in the 2000s, we had five year’s worth of books that had one massive arc connecting over twenty books. After NJO, Lucasbooks would scale back future arcs, but would continue to use this model for the next two major series (with a weird little bridging trilogy between NJO and LotF).
Start with the first one, Vector Prime, and I would say do at least the Stackpole Dark Tide books to see what you think. Some are good, some are so-so, but you can’t say that the NJO series didn’t swing for the fences in a big big way, and I think it sticks the landing. If you read them, let me know what you think about Traitor. I’m still thinking about it like twenty years later.
On Repeat
In the fortnight since I last wrote, Kesha released her fifth studio album, Gag Order.
Not2 to be an absolutely insufferable and pretentious white dude, but Gag Order feels like Kesha’s The Age of Adz. That album was a radical departure for Sufjan Stevens’s after Michigan, Illinoise, and Seven Swans. While no one would ever say Stevens didn’t bear his whole ass soul in all of his albums, Adz was on other level, and he complemented that with a very different kind of music, much less piano and acoustic guitar and much more industrial noise.
Kesha accomplishes much the same in Gag Order. The lyrics are the best she’s ever assembled and feel raw and hurt and (to borrow from a YouTube commenter) like “fully actualized Kesha.” The sound is also a stark departure from both her Animal/Warrior days and Rainbow/High Road. And it’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve listened to this album at least five dozen times. This Carly Rae Jepsen girlie is dreading seeing Spotify Wrapped this year because it’s going to be a close race (especially if CRJ doesn’t release The Loneliest Time Side B this year).
And just check out this video for “Eat the Acid.” This is just the “visualizer” (Kesha hasn’t released a full music video yet) and yet it feels urgent and disturbing and very much consistent with the vibe of the song and the album.
You better believe I got tickets to see her in DC in October. A Kesha show two days before Halloween. I can’t wait.
Finished This Fortnight
Witch King3 by Martha Wells
This is perhaps an unusual case where I’m going to say that you’re better off watching a six minute video of me talking about a book than me writing everything out. Witch King got quite a bit of negative reviews during its advanced reader period which I attribute to a lot of people picking it up expecting something more like Murderbot. Witch King is not Murderbot, but what it is is interesting and I quite liked it.
Lotería by Cynthia Pelayo
I don’t have a lot more to say than I did when I last wrote about Lotería: it’s not the best book of short horror/weird fiction, but I think the structure and the whirlwind tour of Latin American folklore makes it worth checking out.
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
I’ve done about half a dozen TikToks recording my reactions to various crazy things I learned about in this nonfiction masterpiece by Patrick Radden Keefe. Keefe is probably my favorite nonfiction author working today. This book is a must read.
Thrawn (Star Wars) by Timothy Zahn
As I mentioned above, this is the book that cleared the decks for me a bit. And weirdly enough, I didn’t even like it all that much. Perhaps that’s not fair. I thought it was decent, but it felt clunky to me, like Zahn had a brief to both tell the story of how Thrawn became a Grand Admiral and to do a pretty deep tie-in to the Rebels cartoon series (where Thrawn was a major character).
There are numerous and significant connections to Rebels right down to the other main character: Ahrinda Pryce. About half the book is dedicated to her political rise so we can see how she (an important, but ultimately peripheral villain on Rebels) became governor of Lothal. This book could have been called Pryce & Thrawn for how much time is spent with her.
Still Reading
King by Jonathan Eig
No progress in the past fortnight, will be prioritizing it over the next few weeks. Definitely plan to be finished before the end of June.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
I wanted to get out a Frankenstein “historical investigation” (on TikTok, the essay will come when it comes). Now that I’ve cleared my brain a bit, I’ll return to Dracula before branching out into some different eras for my urban fantasy research.
Thrawn: Alliances (Star Wars) by Timothy Zahn
Started this one right after finishing Thrawn. I’m liking it a lot more. It feels less like Zahn was rushing to get characters to where he wanted them to be and more like he can just tell a story with them now. Alliances is a two-timeline book that shows linked missions that Thrawn and Anakin Skywalker and Thrawn and Darth Vader undertook on the same planet a few decades apart. I’m blasting through this one, I’ve got about 150 pages left.
The Galaxy Far Far Away, natch.
You can easily remove “not” from this sentence.
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