Hello. I am B. Mays, this is my reading log, and it is not affiliated with anybody.
What this is
I am reading the entire Star Wars shelf — novels, comics, reference books, young adult, junior fiction, audio drama — and writing up every single one properly. Not a star rating and a shrug. A verdict, a score, and enough words to tell you whether the book is worth the eleven hours it will take out of your life.
The order is deliberate rather than random. I work through an era, then move on, then double back when a later book turns out to depend on something I skipped. The reading order guides are the routes I would actually recommend to another person, which is a slightly different thing from the route I am taking myself.
Why
Because nobody else is doing it consistently. There are excellent Star Wars critics and there are exhaustive Star Wars databases, and there is a gap in the middle where somebody sits down with the 1994 book that everyone mocks and reports honestly on what is in it. I have read enough tie-in fiction to know that the received wisdom about which books are good is wrong maybe a third of the time, and I would like a record of where.
Also, and I want to be honest about this: it is a large, tidy, well-labelled task with a clear finish line, and that is enormously comforting. Most things are not.
How the ratings work
Every reviewed book gets a score out of ten with one decimal place. Books that are catalogued but not yet read carry no score and no verdict at all — a number I have not earned is worse than no number. The decimal is not false precision so much as an admission that 7.4 and 7.9 are genuinely different experiences and I refuse to round that away.
- 9.0–10 — Genuinely good novels that happen to be Star Wars. Read them even if you do not care about Star Wars.
- 7.0–8.9 — Strong tie-in fiction. Worth your time if the subject interests you at all.
- 5.0–6.9 — Competent and forgettable. Fine on a plane.
- 3.0–4.9 — Structural problems. Read the plot summary instead and save the evening.
- Below 3.0 — Life is short and the shelf is very long.
I do not grade on a curve for tie-in fiction, and I do not dock a book for being tie-in fiction either. A book is judged against what it was trying to do.
Canon and Legends
On 25 April 2014 Lucasfilm announced that only the episodic films and The Clone Wars would remain canonical. Everything else published up to that point — roughly thirty-eight years of novels, comics and games — was rebranded Star Wars Legends and taken out of continuity. Everything published since is canon.
This site reads both and labels every entry, because you should always know which shelf you are standing in front of. What I will not do is treat the label as a quality judgement. Some of the best books here are Legends. Some of the weakest are canon. The 2014 decision was a business and storytelling decision, not a review.
Where the two continuities tell different versions of the same story — and Thrawn is the obvious case — I review them as separate books, because that is what they are.
What this site will never do
It will not report rumours as news. It will not invent a release date, an announcement, or a quote from a real person. Everything filed under Dispatches is a retrospective, a reading guide, a roundup, or a clearly-labelled opinion piece, and every factual claim on this site carries a source link at the foot of the page.
Reviews are opinion and are labelled as such. Publication facts — title, author, publisher, year, continuity — are checked against the publisher or another primary source before they go up. If I could not verify something, it is not here. That is why some dossiers say "Not established" instead of guessing.
Spoilers
Reviews assume you want to know what happens. Most of these books are decades old and the statute of limitations has expired. Where a book is genuinely recent, the review says so at the top and keeps the specifics behind a warning.
The unglamorous disclaimer
This is an unofficial fan site. It is not endorsed by, affiliated with, sponsored by, or in any way connected to Lucasfilm Ltd., The Walt Disney Company, or any publisher named on it. Star Wars and all related properties are their trademarks. Every image on this site is original artwork generated by the site itself — no publisher covers, no studio photography, nothing scraped from anywhere. I make no money from this. Nobody sends me review copies. I buy the books.