I’ll fully admit, I’m a bit new to the EU. I only just started reading them a few years ago.
The Thrawn Trilogy is an obvious pick for a reason. Part of why I didn’t get into the EU until later is that a lot of it didn’t feel like Star Wars. These books did. There’s a reason people say this is the actual sequel trilogy. Timothy Zahn did a good job getting the main three right and making a logical continuation of the original trilogy. And it was nice reading Star Wars books that had good plots and didn’t just feel like some bizarre fan-fiction or exposition. It felt fresh too. Thrawn was a good change of pace from the usual Star Wars villains we got. After reading these, I kind of got obsessed with Mara Jade. She’s my favorite character that wasn’t in any of the films. Has a great character arc. I could probably just spend this whole thing talking about how much I like Mara Jade and the Thrawn trilogy.
I like some of the comics. The Marvel adaptations of the original films are really good. Legacy had some good stuff. I enjoyed Dawn of the Jedi (the comics, not the book Into the Void).
The New Jedi Order I liked. I know it’s divisive, but I again liked that they tried something different and ambitious. It felt like a big scale conflict that wasn’t just Empire vs Rebels or Jedi vs Sith again. Surprised they never adapted these books into a Clone Wars style TV show, I think that would have been good. I think it would have been a good conclusion if they had stopped after this series. The next two big scale series they tried doing after this weren’t very good.
Shadows of the Empire. Yeah, I know it was a marketing gimmick, but it had some good stuff in it. Was nice seeing Luke becoming more like his character in Return of the Jedi. More of Boba Fett. Prince Xizor and Dash Rendar were fun additions. It is a bit weird they made everything except a movie. They even had a fucking soundtrack for it. They should have made it into an animated movie or something.
The Han Solo Trilogy by A.C. Crispin I thought was very good. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Brian Daley ones, but these ones I thought did a good job giving Han Solo some backstory. They were gritty, but fun to read. Was interesting seeing him slowly become the scoundrel we all know and love. I do find it a bit weird that they gloss over his academy days and meeting Chewbacca, though.
One of the biggest surprises to me was how good the Revenge of the Sith novelization was. It fleshed out the character motivations and improved the story and dialogue. With a lot of these I just read them and thought “these are fun”, but this one I actually thought was a very good book. Matthew Stover ended up becoming my second favorite EU author after reading this one (Zahn being number one obviously).