Those shelves are lovely…
As is that Harry Potter boxset.
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Thanks! Yeah, my daughter has so dogeared the HP books that we can no longer squeeze all 7 volumes into the case.
I look forward to posting pics of my new shelves once they’re done. This one is much more representative of my wife’s tastes than my own. Most of my SF/F collection was already packed by then. Not that it’s anything spectacular in scope. I got rid of most of my SW EU books except the ones I really loved (Hello, Rogue/Wraith Squadron!), and the rest is mostly Discworld, anthologies, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, and a bunch of King, Barker, Lansdale, and assorted horror.
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Truly the best part of the Expanded Universe.
Actually, all of the X-Wing books are, including Starfighters of Adumar and I, Jedi (which largely redeemed the less-awesome Jedi Academy trilogy).
The only other EU books that come close to measuring up are the Thrawn trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn duology.
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I never got into the books. I have many of them and actually going to give most of them away. The paper backs. I am keeping the hard backs and the old vintage ones. I’ve read the old vintage ones and the Heir to the Empire trilogy. I did read a ton of the comics from the early to mid 90s.
I had a friend who was severely pissed about the EU being nerfed as he read just about every book that came out. Our mutual friend told him that no one really cares about the EU.
Sadly, he died a few months ago, and at some point our mutual friend informed me, “Well, now NO ONE cares about the EU.”
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I assumed you were preventing the Pratchett books from conspiring with each other. 
My Pratchett novels are (mostly) in one place. Since I’m a Discordian, I’m not sure if I would notice if they decided to recreate The Library. The Librarian hasn’t shown up yet, though.
It looks like you’ve got B5 tie-in novels on the top shelf of the second picture there. On the off chance I allow myself to buy any more used books, are they any good? Too many years of Star Trek tie-in novels have taught me to be wary (I think I still have half of my family’s entire collection of those though).
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I’ve been holding off on doing a Grand Tour of the entire Discworld series since Sir Pratchett left us, because, well, you can only read through the entire canon for the first time once.
The B5 books are good, and add to the general plot of the show. The Technomage trilogy is good and adds alot to the general backstory there, and is seamlessly interwoven with the show. The Centauri Prime trilogy is amazing, and really helps explain what happens during those two decades between the end of the show and Sheridan’s jump forward in time. The Telepath trilogy is the weakest, but still gives alot of good background; it’s just weak because it covers such a large ground; first book is the discovery of telepaths on Earth and the founding of PsiCorp, second book is Bester’s childhood, adolescence, and pre-B5 adulthood, third book is Bester on the run and in hiding post-Telepath War (the one mentioned in Crusade). Still good, and adds alot to Bester’s character (and he’s still a smug SOB). To Dream In The City Of Sorrows follows Sinclair’s Ranger training and his time on Minbar before, well… 
Other than that, the tie-in books are of iffy quality and non-canon.
And I hear you on the Star Trek books; I devoured them as a kid, but, looking back on them, it’s really rather obvious how poorly plotted most of them were. (Still better than Keven Anderson’s Dune books, though…)
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Ugh. Most of that sounds amazing. Guess I’ll keep an eye out for them.
We do not speak his name.
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His Captain Nemo book was good. But that’s because KJA only knows how to write pulpy sci-fi, and it fit in really well at that level. Dune… is not pulpy sci-fi. And it looks like we agree on how well the phrase “poor execution” fits on so many levels for his efforts there.
(And even by the standards of pulpy sci-fi, he still flubbed regularly; I still find it rather sad-and-amusing that the Jedi Academy trilogy was so pulpy and poorly plotted out, in true KJA fashion, that Stackpole ended up writing an entire novel to fix the plot holes)
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The KJA YA Star Wars books (Young Jedi Knights) weren’t bad for YA novels.
But yeah, the KJA Dune books were really bad. Like, every couple of chapters there would be something completely out of continuity with the Frank Herbert books.
Not that the Frank Herbert books didn’t have their own issues, but yeah, just bad.
And, like the rest of Stackpole’s X-Wing books, it turned out to be one of the best books in the series (IMO, of course).
I mean, I still prefer Allston and Zahn to Stackpole, but there weren’t a lot of books much better than Stackpole’s.
I wish I could say that there weren’t many books much worse than Anderson’s (Darksaber, Planet of Twilight, and The Crystal Star were bad enough, but the New Jedi Order… Star Wars is supposed to be gritty, not grimdark).
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I got rid of the vast majority of my EU books, and honestly, the ones I kept were mostly paperbacks, except for the Zahn Thrawn ones. The KJA hardbacks were lame, Hambly’s were worse. I got about twelve or thirteen books into the New Jedi order series before I gave up on the EU altogether, having bought and read pretty much all the EU novels before that point going back all the way to Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. I read the first Young Jedi Academy book, but hated it and didn’t pursue that series.
Anyway, ask around before you ditch the paperbacks. You will love the X-Wing series. By no means can you assume that the hardbacks were better books just because they were hardbacks. Except for Zahn’s, most of the HBs weren’t as fun and riproaring as the paperback-only books. Especially the X-Wing series.
You’re wrong there (sez the guy who only read one of them).
…but you’re right there. All three of those guys wrote the best EU material. No stinkers among them.
Do not wait. If an oncoming bus claims you (or, gods forbid, your shelf of Pratchett gets knocked loose during a freak earthquake and lands on your unprotected cranium) and your freshly-discorporated soul finds itself gazing into the strikingly blue eyes of a polite skeleton WHO TALKS LIKE THIS, and you haven’t gotten around to even reading the books yet, boy, are you gonna be embarrassed. And pissed.
Life is short and unpredictable. Read the blessed things while you can. And then read them again, since the second time is arguably even more fun than the first.
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For a 12 year old me, they weren’t bad. They weren’t great, either, but I was able to engage with them at that level. But, even then, I could tell that they didn’t have anything deeper–which, really, is KJA’s hallmark when attempting to use other people’s IPs. He will take things that have deep (or at least engaging) philosophical or mystical concepts and dumb them down to one-dimensional grade-school-level morality tales.
Except Silly Squadron, and Dinner Squadron 
They’ve made a few too many covert entries via waste chutes. 
Joking aside, you know that an author is respected when an entire fandom as divisive as the Star Wars fandom trusts them to patch Lucas’s missteps–which was the general opinion towards Zahn (and, to a lesser extent, Stackpole and Allston) when the prequels came out. Sort of a whole field of puppy-dog eyes at the three of them going, “You can… fix this, right?” It was kinda heartwarming, in a twisted way.
Oh, I’ve read about 3/4 of them already, piecemeal. But I’m only going to be able to do a post-authorial grand tour of the entire series in publication order for the first time once. It’s the sort of thing that I’m actually looking for company in doing, bookclub-style. Y’know. Properly. (I think Terry would find the impulse both hilarious and understandable).
GNUTerryPratchett
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Y’know, we’re all standing right here. Hello, McFly! Say the word, start a thread, and you’ll probably get a dozen of us pulling out our dusty, dogeared copies of The Colour of Magic right now!
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Brownie boxes FTW!
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I got an e-copy of that and a readalong might be fun. Might even learn something.
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twitch twitch
HE CAN’T WRITE ANYTHING GOOD NEMO WAS AN EXTENDED SHIT ON THE LEGACY OF VERNE
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Back when I was interesting I had a lot of fun shooting them. Should I ever finish it I’ll share my current project…
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I like ebooks. They are terribly convenient. But after reading a dozen or so ebook versions by Stross and Pratchett and others of their ilk I am just about convinced of the superiority of a proper footnote over an endnote.
When I get to the endnotes, there always seem to be a few that I’ve missed.
After Christmas, I read the complete Tiffany Aching series. I think I may have skipped over the odd Witches, the odd Guards, Thud (which may have made the Locomotive one a bit less understandable.)
Up for Pratchett. After Piketty of course. le sigh
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I’ll be the first to agree that it wasn’t “great”, or really more than passable, in his usual theme of taking someone else’s original work and stringing together “gee whiz!”-level winking references into a story (I knew that I was growing more mature in my reading tastes as a teen when I shifted from 
to 
to 
over the “Rebel troops have entered the base!” line from Jedi Academy and the Harkonnen no-space base, to give two examples).
But the concept was at least interesting and was at least executed in a three-quarter-assed fashion, as opposed to the half-assed bits that were the Jedi Academy trilogy. And it at least introduced me to Verne’s other work that I wasn’t familiar with at the time to go read the originals, which was a good thing 
.
Really, he writes the kind of fiction you give to pre-teens with the expectation that they’ll enjoy it at first and then quickly mature from it, but is also a “grown up” novel, as opposed to the cheap and thin Scholastic Book Club level stuff “for kids”. But, even there, he’s being squeezed out by better written material.
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Holy shit. Have we not finished that one yet?!
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