[Alexander]

Greetings

Welcome to the Star Wars Book Club Thread. We are still deciding on the specifics of the book club and our approach to what novels to read each month but the basic structure is in place.

We are all fans of the SW extended universe.
We like to read

The premise is to read one novel per month and then discuss it here. There will be voting on what novels to read and the majority of the votes will prevail.

There will be a book listing in SW chronological order. Since there have been so many books written about the SW expanded universe, we'll be focusing on books written after 1990.

Alex

[Alexander]

e-book

[Alexander]

This is still a work in progress. I'm currently working on the Jedi Apprentice Series and the Jedi Quest series and how to work them in

[Alexander]

I'll be back to post the the covers for all books after ATOC and up till after ROTS.

Alex

[BehrItAll]

Nice start, Alex.

How are you doing on Rogue Planet?

"Yoda: Dark Renedeouv" has looooong chapters! It's like a 300 page book with only 12 chapters. I love Scout! She just competed in the tourtament and kicked butt.

So how many books were written before 1990?

[Alexander]

I'm about 120 pages in. It's close to 300 pages but it's a quick read.

I'm not sure about how many books are written before 1990...but when I did a search at amazon or barnes & noble I get like over 1000 books! That's everything, but it's a lot. I'm familiar with novels that deal with events before during and after Episodes I and III. That's where my knowledge ends...but I will be reading post Return of the Jedi novels next year. I've got the entire Jedi Quest series to read, I've got those 2 special edition Jude Watson novels to read that precede that series, I've got Hard Contact, Shatterpoint, Cestus Deception, Medstar I and II, Legacy of the Jedi and Last of the Jedi to read this year...and the new James Luceno novel that we are all patiently waiting for. So that's a lot of reading for me to get done before this year is over.

I'll repost the book listing from the old thread here as well.

Alex

[Roswellian1]

Cool!

Ros1

[Cryostar]

I forgot to mention, also with the Joiner King, you get the eBook ylesia, so it ties in perfectly with the NJO series.

As for the Timothy Zahn books, if you liked the Thrawn trilogy, you should probably also read Survivor's Quest, which details the finding of the wreckage of Outbound Flight. Additionally, the new book in January 2006 by Timothy Zahn will deal with the launch and Thrawn's destruction of the Outbound Flight Project. Something else to look forward too.

This was posted on Starwars.com today by Troy Denning, the Author of Several good NJO books and Joiner King. Some nice points by him:

Last month, the latest Star Wars novel moved beyond the epic events of The New Jedi Order with the paperback release of Dark Nest I: The Joiner King by Troy Denning. In this brief essay, Denning discusses the challenges of building a new trilogy in the shadow of the epic events that shook up the galaxy.
It is a perilous time for the Galactic Alliance. The war against the brutal Yuuzhan Vong has been won, but trillions of beings -- including the mighty Chewbacca and young Anakin Solo -- have perished. Countless worlds have been destroyed, and the galaxy is teeming with homeless refugees whom the fledgling government cannot afford to feed....

When Del Rey asked me to write a trilogy of Star Wars novels featuring the classic heroes -- Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker -- I knew I had a tough act to follow. The New Jedi Order had just ended a tremendous run, introducing a sense of danger and gritty realism into the Star Wars universe that put the fate of even major characters into play. If Chewbacca could die (in R.A. Salvatore's Vector Prime), and Anakin Solo could die (in my own Star by Star), then anyone could die. The galaxy had changed forever.

But The New Jedi Order was also the longest, most intense series of Star Wars novels ever written, and the readers -- as well as the heroes -- needed a break. My story had to be something less than a galaxy-wide war, something on a smaller, less cataclysmic scale.

So my first decision was to make a clean break from the NJO. The story would start five years later, with the Galactic Alliance well into its recovery. And that meant I had to develop a backstory for those five years, and decide how the galaxy had changed after the war. The big questions were:

How was the recovery progressing? Given the gritty tone of the NJO, recovery couldn't be quick or easy. The Galactic Alliance had to be struggling to pull itself together. At the same time, the war had to mean something -- it had to have changed something fundamental about galactic civilization.

I decided that the Galactic Alliance would be blessed by a time of unprecedented peace, but plagued by a plethora of internal problems. A secret cabal of Bothans would still be pursuing their species' genocidal ar'krai against the Yuuzhan Vong. Pirates would abound, taking a grievous toll on Reconstruction Authority supplies, and dozens of criminal syndicates would be vying for control of the smuggling trade. Most dangerous of all, corrupt megacorporations would be greasing palms in the Galactic Senate, using their wealth to steal entire worlds while billions of refugees languished in decrepit orbital cities.

How were the characters changed by the war? The Yuuzhan Vong invasion was unprecedented in its savagery, and its toll on the heroes was staggering both physically and emotionally. Clearly, the characters of the trilogy would need to be sadder and harder than before the war, less trusting and far more wary.

This would be especially true of Han and Leia, who lost both Chewbacca and their son Anakin to the enemy. It's often said that personal tragedy either draws a couple together or drives them apart, and breaking up the Solos is not an option. (Even after the NJO, some ideas remain off-limits.) So they would have to emerge from the war closer than ever, realizing that they have the strength to face anything -- as long as they are together.

How were the Jedi changed by the war? At the end of The New Jedi Order, Luke Skywalker voiced his dream of seeing the Jedi renounce mundane concerns to pursue a longer view of the Force. That's a great ending for a series, but it makes for a pretty dull space opera. So I knew the Jedi would be dragged back into the mundane, forced by the necessities of the moment to devote themselves to preserving the Galactic Alliance.

And it seemed very clear to me that they would be effective. The Jedi's battles against the Yuuzhan Vong had instilled in them an iron will to win, and the new view of the Force taught by Vergere -- the mysterious Knight from the Old Republic -- had made them more powerful than they ever dreamed possible.

But (at least from a storyteller's viewpoint) powerful characters are only interesting when they have big flaws. Fortunately, the NJO had provided a nice opening for me. The war had turned many Jedi cold and ruthless, and for others it had blurred the boundaries between right and wrong. It would not be a stretch to suggest that many Knights had started to care more about the success of a mission than whether it was justified... and that, of course, is the recipe for moral conflict.

Once those questions had been answered, I had the central conflict for my trilogy (and -- as it turned out later -- also the foundation for the upcoming Legacy of the Force series -- but I can't talk about that now).

As the first book opens, Luke Skywalker is unhappy with the Jedi order's role in propping up the Galactic Alliance, and he's growing increasingly worried as he watches many of his Knights start down a dark path from which they might never return. His fears mount when seven Knights -- all survivors of the ill-fated Myrkr operation -- answer a mysterious call for help and disappear into the Unknown Regions. Before long, their actions have embroiled the entire Jedi order in a precarious standoff -- one that might well plunge the galaxy back into war.

You'll find the rest in the pages of Dark Nest I: The Joiner King. I hope you enjoy the story!

[Alexander]

What? Chewie dies?! Oh come on

[BehrItAll]

Thanks for the article. I am so getting that book this week.

I need to learn how to read faster. So many books so little time.

[Roswellian1]

Oh Timothy Zahn’s book is going to be released next year. Thanks for the article. I hang out at starwars.com a couple of days a week and I see that I missed this article.

I am currently reading Joiner King and it is extremely slow, IMO, in the beginning.

Spoiler:

These bugs do not interest or intrigue me.

It is beginning to pick up around page 200. I think Ben Skywalker is too adorable for words. Overall, I still believe that I will enjoy the book upon completion-at least I hope so.


Ros1

[Roswellian1]

One of the guys on this other board told us that he was at C3 and attended the Tim Zahn panel and he told him he was the Elvis Presley of the SW novelists and asked about his upcoming classic era book Allegiance and what interested him was when asked about Luke and Mara's son Ben Skywalker. Zahn said that he would be interested in writing a Luke/Mara/Ben novel in the Legacy era after the events of the Legacy of the Force arc depending on how well Ben is developed in LOTF and if LFL & DR are interested.

I personally think that would be cool.

Ros1

[IsadoraQ]

I was just browsing through your conversations (hope you don't mind), but I saw that someone wanted to know how many novels were released prior to 1990. I don't know the exact number, but there is an extremely helpful website dedicated to adult Star Wars novels.

http://books.echostation.com/

That lists just about all of the SW books I've ever heard of. It's more thorough than any other site I've seen so far. Hope that helps,

Isadora.

P.S. I finished reading Rogue Planet a few months ago and enjoyed it. Hope you enjoy it as well.

Also, another good novel is Shatterpoint, an adventure "starring" the wonderfully interesting Mace Windu.

[Roswellian1]

Welcome, IsadoraQ! Are you joining our book club?

Ros1

[Ron_Beckett]

Cool, you all got it started! Unfortunately I won't be able to read every book on the list as I have too many to read for AP English but I'll try to see what I can do.