Star Wars Books: The Best Of The Best Top 10 List

One of the greatest laments I see from fans I meet, or read comments from, is that the voluminous tomes of Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) books were made into Legends…. Thus, forever excluded from canon. Anything published prior to 2014 is just that… only a legend. I wonder if there’s a signed Order 66 on a Disney desk somewhere that purged them all from canon.

The stories still exist, mind you, but as whispers and back-alley tales. They are the stories the kids working the stables on Canto Bight play out with their hand-carved toys. The kind of stories a young Jyn Erso may have heard her father talk about while in service to the Empire. Even Rey had only heard of the Jedi and Luke Skywalker. She didn’t know they were real either.

Disney took Star Wars canon into a new realm, unfortunately leaving some greatest galactic yarns in the cosmic dust. That doesn’t mean you can’t still get your hands on these legends though. Here’s a stab at the top ten brightest of those that, even though some are not canon, are still a fantastic read.

NOTE: There may be SPOILERS AHEAD if you have not read any of these. Read on at your own peril. Now, buckle up back there… here we go.

Best Star Wars books #10 – The Lost Tribe of the Sith: Collected Stories by John Jackson Miller

This book collects all eight parts of the Lost Tribe of the Sith series, along with the Pandemonium novella. It rests squarely on my list of must-read Star Wars material on the ancient Sith. I’ve read this one twice and will still read it again.

It begins about 5000 BBY during the time of Naga Sadow. A Sith ship is ambushed, crashing on the remote planet of Kesh. There, a mixture of humans and the Sith species remained isolated; hidden away from the galaxy until 41 ABY. The eight stories and the novella span generations of that 5041-year period. Together they tell an awesome story of why the original Sith species are extinct, up to the Sith and Jedi working together at times. Pick this one up for plain ol’ good Star Wars story-telling.

#9 – Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber

This one will always make my top-ten list because of how awesome it marries the horror genre and Star Wars. This is one of those rare books that makes you, for a few moments, feel sorry for the bad guys. All the while, you’re eagerly turning the pages to see what happens next. It truly does have the feel of Alien, which in fact, when I asked Joe about that. Here’s what he had to say about his influence on the book:

“… I also went back and revisited some of my favorite SF/horror movies, and tried to figure out what worked so well for me — Alien, The Shining, The Thing, anything that played around with the kind of cavernous, hulking sense of isolation that I was trying to evoke on that old freighter.”

Joe Schreiber

It follows a ship of doomed Empire prisoners on their way to a prison moon On the journey, they encounter a seemingly abandoned Star Destroyer on the edge of wild space, only to find it’s not abandoned at all. This book is a fun ride that brings some familiar heroes from the Star Wars universe face-to-face with, well, what else? Zombie Storm Troopers! A fun read for any Star Wars fan. And that cover art… awesome!