I just finished a complete reread of all the Legends and Canon books. Here are some comments and rankings as well a a handy excel sheet to keep track of books.

With great sadness I have finally finished my reread of the Legends universe. Two and a half years of reading 213 novels. I had started the reread as a pallet cleanser between reading NEU books and to see if everything held up or if it was just "rose coloured glasses". It wasn't and I found myself loving the universe as much now as I did as a kid. Even more so now since I was actually reading things in order instead of what ever I could grab from B&N. Also during my reading their wasn't any sort of continuity snarl that I felt broke/damaged the universe. By the time Legends ended their were more than enough other stories that smoothed out those snarls and problems that if they came up they could just be put down to unreliable narrator. Nor was most of it focused on Luke or the Skywalkers.Every time I would open a book I would be reminded of the first time I read it or find myself either excited at something I had missed before when I was little or laughing because I knew what the reveal was going to be. Their were some books that I had to push though, as much as I love the NJO series it is just about 9 books to long, but I'm glad I did it. I may not do a full reread again but their are lots of books I will go back and find myself reading again in the future.I'm not sure if its so much feelings associated with where I was in life when I first read them but each era (as in real world 90's 00' 10's) had its own distinct feel and style to it. I found the books in the 90's to have a comfy familiar feeling that seemed to breathe the essance of SW while the 00's felt a lot more cleaner and modern. Those in the 10's forward though while holding a few greats like the Kenobi novel or Pleagus mostly felt sterile and in some cases dissociative with everything else (which is how the early NEU feels as well. More sterile )When I went though I put a grade by each book and averaged it for that era. 1= never read again, 2=bad probably not going to read again, 3=good/ok, 4=good probably read again, 5= great, definitely going to read againBefore the Republic Era = 1 Novel, 4/5Old Republic Era= 10 Novels 3.6/5Rise of the Empire Era*= 110 Novels, 4/5Rebellion Era= 26 Novels 3.5/5New Republic Era= 55 Novels 4/5New Jedi Order Era= 22 Novels 4.3/5Legacy Era= 23 Novels 2.7/5 (I would be fine totally skipping from NJO to the Legacy comics and pretending this whole era doesn't exist)Overall I ended up giving the Legends EU 4/5 stars. Its not perfect but their is a ton more good than bad in all of it. Its definitely something I would suggest for everyone to read. Even if its just picking up the books in a era you think sound cool. Legends was Star Wars for basically 24+years and its still Star Wars to me.*Rise of the Empire is one big era under the Del Rey timeline but it encompases not only two different eras in the movies (the PT era and post RotS era) but in the history of the EU with most of its post RotS stuff coming before the 90's and birth of the modern EU and the PT era stuff coming in the 2000's with the reveal of the PT and the Clone Wars Multimedia project. Two distinct eras with different levels of over site and different feelings to the stories.Like I had said I started my reread as a palate cleanser between the NEU books. Since I am caught up on them I thought I would go ahead and make the same kind of scoring system for them as well. The NEU is constantly growing and changing so of course the scores will continue to fluctuate, espically when we still have four more stories to come out this year. And my own views change as well. I hated Bloodline the first time I read it. But now that I have accepted TFA as being a thing and they have revealed more about the FO machinations I've went from disliking it to giving it a 4. Some stories I liked better on a second read and some I liked less.I feel like as time has went on the stories in the NEU have gotten overall better. They are still really self contained and mainly exist to fill in background and character bios but they have been some really good stories so far. They do reference other stories but is usually in a "hey we mentioned that guy/place from that other story" kind of thing. And I hope that soon the floodgates on the Luke stories will open up after TroS. Overall I would say though the stories have been getting better. I feel like the first year and a half was where most of the negative scores came from..most because I couldn't give negative scores for Last Shot.Before the Republic Era = 0, not graded becasue....yeah nothing here yetOld Republic Era= 0, Still noting..going to have to wait until 2021Rise of the Empire Era*= 31 Novels, 3.5/5Rebellion Era= 14 Novels, 2.7/5New Republic Era= 8 Novels, 2/5Second Galactic Civil War Era= 12 Novels 2.6/5Total for the NEU for me is 3/5 just one point below Legends and in the "ok/good" range of things. Which fits as their are a lot more books on my "I want to go back and reread this" list in legends than their is i the NEU. It still doesn't exactly feel like my universe and some times their are things characters do that don't feel right with how I grew up with them but for the most part (save one or two books) it does feel like Star Wars and make me want to continue reading more about the universe.TLDR: Legends 4/5 and NEU 3/5 via /r/StarWars https://ift.tt/2HbfopS