The Heir to the Empire Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

If you cast your mind back to 1992, when The Heir to the Empire came out, you may recall that Return of the Jedi had been released nearly a decade before, but kids my age were still very much into Star Wars. Nevertheless, in a significantly less consumerish environment, there weren't any action figures still available, (I can remember searching old stores for leftovers) and there wasn't the plethora of books, comics, tv shows, legos, audiobooks, and God knows what else from the Star Wars universe available. In 1992, however, Sci-Fi veteran Timothy Zahn was authorized to write a continuation of the Star Wars saga. It was, of course a huge hit, and it would probably still have been a huge hit had it been a poorly written, but actiony story. It wasn't. Zahn created a wonderfully complex story with some terrific characters, some of which were coopted later by significantly inferior writers (although I must say I am pleased no one seriously tried to coopt Thrawn.) The story keeps one guessing, and even though, much like in the Star Wars movies themselves, you knew that the good guys would win, and you knew more certainly in these stories that Zahn probably wouldn't be allowed by LucasArts to kill off the main characters, but the new characters were fair game, and many of them were rich enough that you did care about them. As a kid, I went on to read some of the many many many many other Star Wars books that followed the success of this experiment, but none of them really measured up to Zahn's stories. I went on to read most of everything else Zahn ever released, and am glad that I did so. Most of the other Star Wars books were barely worth reading, but Zahn's trilogy, and the four or five other Star Wars books he's released since, even the one where he had to try to reclaim one of his most popular characters (Mara Jade) was quite enjoyable and still innovative, despite the saturation of the Star Wars market.

Planning/Format

So, I intend to roughly follow Nick Hornby's format. Although his was a monthly column, I will try to update more or less daily, as this will allow me to cover more books and have a better memory as to each that I read. I will also post periodic updates of the books that I purchase. So, for the first of those, I will list the books that I bought in my two most recent trips to Half Price Books:

• Nick Hornby: The Polysyllabic Spree
• Nick Hornby: Shakespeare Wrote for Money
• Timothy Zahn: Night Train to Rigel
• Timothy Zahn: Cobras Strike
• Vikram Seth: Beastly Tales

The two Nick Hornby books are pretty much the same--The Polysyllabic Spree is described below, and Shakespeare is basically a same-again sequel. Night Train to Rigel is the first in a series of Timothy Zahn books to which I already own the second book, and Cobras Strike is actually a book I've already read in a collection called Cobras Two which, no doubt, will be discussed later in this blog. Zahn is one of my favorite authors, since I discovered him in one of the few Star Wars books that are worth reading, Heir to the Empire and its progeny, which introduced the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn. The Vikram Seth (author of A Suitable Boy) book is written in couplets, which intrigues me. I'm not generally one for poetry, but these are actually stories written in verse, like the old Latin poems that I translated in college. Not enough people write in verse any more, so I'm hoping that this will be good, and even if it's not, it is something that I bought with an eye towards a gift for my father.