I always thought Timothy Zahn was an above average author, and to wrote more than a dozen of them.

Absolutely. I highly recommend both canon Thrawn trilogies by Timothy Zahn.

Maybe? There are a lot of them and the quality varies depending on the book. You can’t go wrong with the original Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and Last Command were considered the unofficial sequel trilogy by some fans and they started off the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, which got rebranded to the Legends continuity when Disney took over. Besides the Thrawn Trilogy, I’d also recommend the Revenge of the Sith novelization. I went in not expecting much, but it really expands on a lot of things the movie brushes over, and witnessing Anakin’s story from his viewpoint was a lot more compelling than what we got in the movie. From there, it really depends on what you want to read about.
The Star Wars book finder is a neat tool that lets you search by author, topic, or genre if you’re looking for something specific.

99% Invisible had a mini-episode about movie novelizations. I think the Star Wars novelizations were mentioned in it, and the whole thing was rather interesting. Particularly where the author has limited info and has to guess about what might happen in the movie.

I only ever read the Thrawn trilogy and they were decent.

I read several of the Rogue Squadron books while on a long vacation and enjoyed them a lot, but they weren’t anything life changing.

They aren’t going to change you view on life, but most are pretty solid. I highly recommend pretty much any books in the High Republic era, particularly “Light of the Jedi”. It’s the first of the new era and it’s a great introduction to the setting. It’s all set a few hundred years before the movies, so the Authors were able to pretty much do whatever they wanted within the basic Star Wars universe.

I’ve enjoyed dozens of them over the course of my twenty something years being into SW. Currently I’d recommend the Plagueis, Tarkin, the Thrawn books, and the Bane trilogy. Apparently I like villain books. I’ve also enjoyed the Karen Traviss Clone Trooper books but they got cancelled for canon reasons due to the TCW series.

Authors have plenty of freedom unless you’re talking about novelizations of the films.

I read every Star Wars novel there was in the mid 90s. I don’t regret it. It’s cheap sci fi, in a framework of an established universe. There are some cool stories.

Unfortunately, the stuff I read now isn’t canon (I think?). I read Timothy Zahn’s and Kevin J Anderson’s series, that took place 5 and 7(12?) years after Endor.

The Adventures of Han Solo is dope as fuck, and I still use the dogfighting strategy I learned in that book when I play anything with dogfighting. Same with The Adventures of Lando Calrissian, though it gets a little funkier with the sci fi elements. There’s a whole thing with teleporting space whales talking about pooping in battle.

Tales from Jabba’s Palace, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, those are fun because they give every character in the background a backstory. All the stories intersect then go their separate ways at the moments appearing in Episodes 4 and 6. Like you learn the happy puppy love between the rancor and the guy in the hood, and it makes it sadder when you see him cry.

I remember reading Timothy Zahn as a teen and not being able to put the books down. Tbh I think his plotlines are better than the movies.

Any Timothy Zahn books are quite good. I love Thrawn.

iirc, in the 90’s the older books had a set of guidelines they had to adhere to, like no stories that take place before episode 4, or Luke couldn’t have sex, I don’t remember much more than that, but I think they were pretty free to tell any story if they stayed within the guidelines.

TBH I have no idea what the rules are now.

I’ve read a few over the years and always enjoyed them. They’re never amazing or anything imo, I’ve never run into one that knocked it out of the park or anything, but I’m not a huge Star Wars fan anyway.

But they also kinda get a baseline level of decent worldbuilding and natural conflict that keeps them from being dull or anything.

If I was, say, in an airport and needed to buy a book, it’s exactly what I would reach for if I saw it. Favorite was the one that followed and explained Mace Windu.

Yes, I recommend the 501st series iirc the first book is called 501 hard contact. Sadly the series was never finished but it is still worth the read.

Being a star wars fan and avid reader I felt like I should give them a try, did some research and the consensus seemed to be that the thawn trilogy was the best, read book one and hated it for how one-dimensional the characters were, nothing at all noteworthy from a literary perspective

Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the original sequel, before they had budget. The Brian Daley Han Solo books, L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian books, and Mike Stackpole’s X-Wing books, are all pretty good. Daniel Keys Moran of The Long Run and more recently AI War/Time War fame, wrote a few short stories.

Almost everything else I ever even read a couple pages of was so awful I threw it down. These were all written long before Disney got hold of it, and nobody really cared much about canon. Modern stuff would be corporate pablum.