This site exists because I ran out of margin.
For years the Star Wars shelf lived in a notebook: title, author, year, a star rating I kept revising, and a scrawl about whether the thing was worth pressing on someone else. The notebook worked until it did not. The problem is not that there are a lot of Star Wars books. The problem is that there are a lot of Star Wars books arranged along two different timelines, split across two continuities, published by at least four different houses across five decades, and sold to you in an order that has nothing to do with either the story or the history.
The shape of the problem
Prose Star Wars is older than most people assume. Alan Dean Foster ghost-wrote the novelisation of the first film for Ballantine in November 1976, six months before the film opened, and followed it with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye in 1978. Marvel’s comic ran from 1977 to 1986. Brian Daley wrote three Han Solo novels between 1979 and 1980. None of that is the Expanded Universe as most readers use the term — that starts in 1991 — and all of it is still sitting on the shelf, still readable, and still almost impossible to place unless someone tells you where it goes.
Then, on 25 April 2014, Lucasfilm drew a line through the lot of it. The six episodic films and The Clone Wars stayed canon; everything else went under a banner called Legends and kept being printed. That single decision doubled the shelf. It did not delete a single book. It just meant every book now needs a second label.
What this site does
Four things, and nothing else.
- It logs. Every entry gets a real title, a real author, a real publisher, a real year and a canon or Legends tag. If I cannot verify a detail, the field is left empty rather than guessed at.
- It reviews. The scores are mine, the opinions are mine, and I will argue about them. See what the scores mean before you get annoyed at one.
- It orders. The reading order page exists because the single most common question anyone asks about this shelf is “where do I start”, and the honest answer is “it depends on which part of Star Wars you already like”.
- It explains. Eras, factions, publishing regimes, the difference between an Essential Guide and a Visual Dictionary. Context is the thing a good catalogue gives you that a shopping list cannot.
What this site will never do
It will not report news it has not verified. It will not print a release date it cannot source, it will not invent a quote, and it will not run a rumour with a question mark on the end of the headline. Everything filed under Dispatches is either a guide built from published bibliographic fact, a retrospective on something that has already happened, an essay about craft, or a signed opinion column with my name on it. If a piece is an argument rather than a record, it says so at the top.
A catalogue is only useful if you trust every line of it. One invented fact and the whole thing is decoration.
Where to begin
If you have never read one of these books, start with the starting guide. If you have read a shelf of them and want to argue, start with the reviews. If you are here because you already know exactly which corner of the galaxy you like, use the era pages and skip me entirely. That is the correct use of a reference site.
This is an independent fan project. It carries no announcements and no insider information.