I am reading Heir to the Empire right now but am only about a quarter of the way through and and will certainly not be done before TFA. But it’s great so far and I’ll definitely have it done at some point!
You know that feeling when you lose track of a TV show that you’ve been obsessed with, and then months later just don’t feel much of a desire to go back to it? I think this kind of happened to me with HTTE. I definitely liked it, and I won’t deny that the fact that TFA came out sort of derailed my EU novel marathon, which was done mainly as prep for TFA. I definitely needed to take a break from SW this summer, too, so that didn’t help.
But still, when I tried to read some more a few weeks ago, I just couldn’t really get into it. Anyone else not in love with the Thrawn books? It seems like everyone says their the best the old EU has to offer. And yet, nothing about them has particularly grabbed me yet (and I’s day I’ve made it about half way through HTTE). I’m a little worried it might just not be what I’m looking for in a SW story. Too much military stuff, too much sci-fi (ysalmiri - ugh). I don’t know. I’ll definitely finish at least the first book, but I don’t know if I’ll move on to the others. There are other SW books I want to read and I don’t want to waste too much time on a book that I rarely feel like reading.
I hear you. Everyone kept saying that the Thrawn trilogy was so amazing, so I bought the books and read through them. It was only after I’d finished the first one that I realized that I had already read them years earlier. They are that forgettable. Zahn is good at military sci-fi fiction, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t understand what makes Star Wars tick. Granted, it’s a difficult genre, and even George Lucas clearly doesn’t understand it based on what we got in the prequels. I don’t know if any EU writer has managed to capture the wide-eyed wonder and fun of the originals, complete with archetypal yet layered main characters, retro lived-in universe, dystopic anthropological and technological undercurrents, magical spiritualism, and fairytale endings.
It’s a difficult quest at the best of times.