Lit Can I just cut to the chase and read "The Unifying Force?"

The Unifying Force is the best NJO book and best SW book ever but you might the others to get the full picture. I suppose you can read the synopsis in Destiny's Way, read that one and skim through Force Heretic Trilogy and The Final Prophecy and then TUF. I would look at all the books though. They are all worth a read.
I didn't read VP until a year or two later. I remember seeing the Dark Tide books in a store before I got into that era. I got VP sometime and that took sometime to get over. After got over that I got Dark Journey from the library sometime later and read it. The first book I bought and then continued onto the end after that was Force Heretic 1 Remnant. I look back fondly on that one.
It is a hard slog going through all of them. It took me 2 months last summer to do it. That was rough but bearable.

 

Sure. With TUF your not just reading the final book of the Vong era, your reading the best Star Wars novel since THE THRAWN TRILOGY and X-Wing novels. And the way it looks it will be the last great Star Wars novel as well.

If you want a more complete journey through the NJO that takes a shorter time to get to TUF then just read STAR BY STAR, TRAITOR, and then Destiny's Way. Pretty much all you need.

 

Red Two: I think RC-1991, Force Smuggler and DarthMane2's reactions bring up a good point -- even if the NJO wasn't consistent, a lot of us have "favorite" books in that series. That is, favorite books out of the entire EU, which is definitely saying something. So if you skip any, you might risk skipping a book you would potentially have loved (maybe not Dark Journey... although I know people who loved that one too, so to each their own I suppose ).

Ahhh thanks! The last few pre-TUF books sort of merge in my mind at this point.

 

Also you must read Aaron Allston's Enemy Lines duology. That duology will be worth it.

 

To be honest, I've never had much of a problem with Dark Journey either. It definitely has some issues, but I actually thought it was a decent Jaina book.

And yes. To forgo Enemy Lines is to forgo Wedge reestablishing just why he's the greatest pilot of all time. and Operation Emperor's Spear. Gods, Operation Emperor's Spear.

 

IMO Final Prophecy is a vital stepping stone to the whole Yuuzhan Vong storyline.

y'know, the whole mystery and stuff . . . don't want to spoil

also Nom anor's plot

reading TUF without it would be a mistake IMO

 

Nom Anor's plot, not important? Sacrilege.

 

It might not be an absolutely critical plot in TFP, but Nom enough reason to read a book. He's the reason that the Force Heretic trilogy was even mildly tolerable.

 

True. I hated the Force Heretic trilogy. I flew through Destiny's Way, but it took me forever to read those books. Only thing it had going for it was Pallaeon and Anor.

 

Hate this duology. Beginning of Allston's downfall as a writer, then again Wraith Squadron wasn't that good either.

 

Comedy is Allston's forte. Love the Enemy Lines duology, his LOTF books and Wraith Squadron books. All great. His weakest books were his FOTJ books.

 

I'm not saying this is true for the NJO, because as I said I haven't even read the damn thing (I'm certainly building up to it enough, though), but I do believe some things can only be accurately assessed in retrospect. The NJO made some very controversial changes to the status quo, infringing on things some considered sacred. It's only natural there would be a very vocal outcry on release. So I don't find it surprising opinion has warmed on the NJO, and I don't think the same will happen with LOTF (unless Episode VII is so bad that it makes LOTF look masterful).

On that note, I remember browsing the old SOS posts, because I wanted to see the reaction to TUF. I wasn't disappointed; it went from aimless moaning to practically a celebration. I know very well how hard it is to to reverse the opinion of an embittered fan. Can't wait to reach TUF.

 

Sure you can. Just like you can skip right to Night Watch without reading the rest of the Discworld novels. But you won't get the same amount of satisfaction or references on its own.

 

^ all examples of people's differing opinions lol

for the record i disagree with all of you
Enemy Lines --> awesome
Force Heretic --> fantastic (seems to be an unpopular opinion)

 

Enemy Lines is awesome.
Force Heretic Remnant was probably the best one. The blurb got me into it. I liked the trilogy but not my most favorite entry in Star Wars. I do like that we got to see the Unknown Regions and the Chiss and the rest of the galaxy.

 

It was always popular, because it was always amazingly good. The people who bitched about it bitched very, very loudly, and I won't say they were a small group, but they certainly weren't the entire fandom. They just made a lot of noise on the boards. And they've mostly left now, so there's a lot less bitching about OH MY GOD GUYS THEY KILLED CHARACTERS THIS IS THE WORST, whereas the people who loved Traitor and Nom Anor and the Solo kids and a big, well-covered, coherent war and General Antilles and the Battles of Coruscant and the unified cast and everything else are still around to remember the glory days of novelized serial EU storytelling.

 

It just seems that everyone likes it now, becaue everyone that hated it left, and the only ones left are those who liked it

 

Now that's an old joke! DT is, for me, akin to SBS, they have some brilliant facets and others I utterly despise and wish had never been done! BP I have a special attachment to as I nabbed a copy about 2 weeks early of the release date and had a ton of fun with it, even had a couple of PMs from Tyers about it. And I really like a lot of what she does in the book, pity that was it.

For myself, the controversy over Traitor always seemed quite overblown, I'm a far bigger fan of Shatterpoint.

Also, though, on fans being around and not, quite a few of NJO's biggest fans were not necessarily still around by the end of it! For some I think SBS killed their liking for it.

I would disagree that people were embittered, we were all still buying the books! No, the problem is you had a very dark, very vicious series with a massive story and 1 volume left to close it. Given all NJO had done up to that point, sheer precedent suggested a quite nasty resolution was on the cards - which I wouldn't have necessarily been against depending on how it was executed, which is what a large part of my criticism of NJO are on. Now, it's easy to ask what we were all worried about, but pre-TUF the picture was very different!

 

Consider that TUF came out almost ten years ago. For every disappointed fan who stopped posting at the time, how many new fans have shown up who read it all post-release? Whatever the current feeling is around here, it owes as much to those people as it does to us die-hard oldbies.

"The NJO is a train" was the first "Cad Bane does he contradict the EU".

 

Lest we forget.

 

I didn't even mention comedy. Which speaking of; is very lacking, and genuinely just juvenile and not even funny the further you get away from Wraith Squadron. Even that humor is very 'eh' and in compared to numerous other 'comedy' books, is just so lacking. Read Hitchhiker's Guide, then read Wraith Squadron novels, and tell me that if it wasn't an attempt to insert a large quantity of humor into SW you would even find it funny/care.