I've said it before, but I wouldn't be half the Star Wars fan I am today without the EU. It kept me into it. I liked the continuing stories and the Tales books and so on. It gave the films an even fuller feeling universe. Yes, some books aren't too great (Planet of Twilight, The Black Fleet Crisis minus Lando, a good chunk of the NJO which practically killed my interest in reading them[I'm only 10 years behind]), and so much of the universe now aligns itself with the PT (not all stormtroopers are clones, dammit), but I still like a lot of them, and really need to catch up. I've already heard about the post NJO stuff already, and I used to be among the first to know, not the spoiled.

The thing about Lucas contradicting the EU is, and what most people fail to realize, is that it's written with the understanding that if Lucas decides he wants to explore the section of the universe you wrote about, whatever he comes up with will trump your ideas.

Yet one of the biggest kicks I got out of TPM was how much of the EU stuff actually made it into the film (at least the little known about it). Case in point being that I learned about Prequel central planet Coruscant from Timothy Zahn and others, not George Lucas. I still pronounce it the same why I read it when I was 10 too (namely with a hard 2nd "c").