Star Wars Book Graphs!!

I read a lot of Star Wars books, and I recently completed the entire catalogue of canon adult-grade novels, young-adult novels, and script books that exists (as of the beginning of 2025). To satisfy my infornographic desires, I ranked all the books, and then created a small dataset that includes all of these novels as well as some variables that better allowed me to see what exactly might affect my enjoyment of certain books over others. The graphs that follow are just scratching the surface of what I could do with these, but I figure I'll probably wait and update the dataset yearly (or whenever I feel like it) to make any further claims. Hopefully as more books come out more interesting trends will begin to appear, but below is what I have so far. Enjoy!

Average Ranking by Year of Release

Now because these rankings are on a scale from 1-to-64, a lower average means that I enjoyed books with a certain attribute more. The first thing I wanted to look at was if I enjoyed books from a certain year more than others, and I can say I definitely did. My favorite year for Star Wars books so far has been 2021, which coincides with the start of The High Republic publishing intiative, as well as the conclusion of the Alphabet Squadron trilogy of books. Phase I of THR really knocked it out of the park in terms of consistency, so I'm not surprised that it carried 2021 to be so high. My second favorite year--2023--also included my favorite phase of THR (phase II), as well as my current favorite Star Wars book of all time Inquistor: Rise of the Red Blade by Delilah Dawson. As for my least favorite years, it definitely skews toward the start of the new continuity, with 2014 being my least favorite year. Although, with only two books releasing this year, it's not surprising that this iffy start dragged 2014 down. 2018 was also a year with a pretty high average score, which I'm not too sure has any meaning behind it other than misfortune. Thrawn: Alliances released that year, which I wasn't a huge fan of, and so did Most Wanted, the Solo YA tie-in book that I straight up did not like, so I guess it's just the order of circumstance. Overall I'm definitely enjoying books that have come out recently more, so that's a good sign that I enjoy the direction Star Wars publishing has been going (which I already knew, but is now backed up with data!! :3)

THR Rankings by Phase

Next, I felt it necessary to break down my rankings within The High Republic a little more to get a better grasp of what I actually enjoy. This boxplot displays the average score of each phase while still including the individual scores for each book (though they aren't labelled). As expected, THR phase II is my favorite by a fair margin, beating out phase I, but not by as much as expected. I think I tend to forget how good the first few books of phase I were because of how much I like the entirety of phase II, but Light of the Jedi and The Rising Storm are some really good stories! Phase III has been my least favorite so far, but it would've been a lot worse if Tears of the Nameless hadn't been such a good book. I generally like the YA books less than adult-grade (which we'll get into further down), but TotN was so good it broke that pattern! And hopefully with the release of the final two THR books later this year (I'm not really counting the middle-grade book, though, hey, maybe I should) phase III will conclude satisfyingly. Though I'm not sure the average will be brought down enough with how high I ranked Defy the Storm haha.

Luminous Authors Regplot

Next up I wanted to see if I liked books written by the authors of the High Republic (codename project luminous) more than books written by non-THR authors. I did a regression plot on the average scores of books with luminous authors, and as it turns out, I significantly enjoy books by luminous authors more than the average! Statistically signficantly, even, which is rare for trends like these with such a small dataset lol. I think this speaks to just how good Lucasfilm publishing is at picking authors, given they chose such good ones for THR. Even in non-THR books, I enjoy stories written by THR-authors more than average. I actually did a regression plot for legends-authors, which are authors who wrote both canon and legends books, and found that I like legends-authors' books slightly less than average, though it wasn't statistically significant enough to put here. I think the values/story-content of Lucasfilm's publishing has only gotten better over time. I find that, when reading legends content, I enjoy later stories more than earlier ones. Of course, this may have to do with changing political values, but that's a whole other story. Put simply, I like the writing of the luminous authors, and I hope that they keep writing star wars for a long time!

Rankings by Type of Book

This isn't my last graph, but it's the last one I'm going to show off today. I wanted to take a look at what kinds of books I enjoy more, and unsurpisingly I enjoy young-adult novels the least. Adult-grade and script books are just about at the average score (32 in this dataset), but YA books are squarely above that. There are plenty of YA books that I enjoy--The Hunger Games is one of my all-time favorites--but I find that a lot of Star Wars YA books are too heavy-handed in their metaphors and lesson-teaching. That and I think there may be less importance placed on the events of YA books, so they matter less to the overall continuity (with the exception being THR YAs). Path of Deceit is one of my favorite Star Wars books of all time, but for every Path of Deceit there's 2 Force Collectors (which is my absolute least favorite Star Wars books so far). And it's a shame because I know that YA books have the potential to be great, I just am not super intrigued by most of them. Granted, I am not the target audience, so my opinion probably matters very little, it's just a trend I noticed.

That's about all I have for this page. I may add more if I feel like it, but it'll probably be on a different page so as to better be able to add updated info. I was going to upload the dataset that I used here so readers could edit it and create their own graphs using their own rankings, but neocities wouldn't let me upload an excel file. Oh well! If you care to create your own ranking/graphs, share it with me!! I'm @girlbossked on twitter, and probably a similar username on most websites, so be sure to message me!!