On both points you are correct. Depending on when the book was published/printed you will get a timeline in the first few pages. And Wookieepedia does have a chronology, http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_books That being said, like watching the movies in the order they were released, the Zahn trilogy should be the first thing you read.

I get a little bummed too. But what usually gets me out of that is knowing how much technology has advanced BECAUSE of ST and SW.

I agree with the above: Zahn/Thrawn trilogy, Han Solo trilogy, Rogue Squadron series. I also found the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy to be entertaining - Boba Fett's the "hero". And if you read the Jedi Academy Trilogy - "I Jedi" puts an interesting spin on those events.

WiGhTkNiGhtt something to also remember is that as someone already pointed out years go by between E2 and E3. And then at least several months pass during the events of E3 - Padme says shes pregnant at the beginning of E3 and is not even showing any signs and by the end of the movie she's giving birth. That is a pretty good indication that we are not talking about days or weeks but months; months during which Anakin has persistent nightmares of Padme's death, where he is probably having conversations with Palpatine like the one in the theater, where he is becoming more and more disillusioned with the Jedi order and their restrictions on attachment, etc etc etc. As Seductivpancakes points out the changes in Anakin's behavior is subtle. He is toeing, and sometimes crossing, the line between light and dark, but up until the confrontation between Windu and Palpatine, Anakin always finds his way back to the light. However, that confrontation gives Anakin the final shove to the dark side (IMO it was not only Palpatine's doing, Windu's solution to the problem also caused turmoil in Anakin). Something else to think about, look how fast Luke goes to the dark side at the end of E6 - it turns out that it is the only way he can beat Vader. In addition, think about how fast Vader turns back to the light when the Emperor is killing Luke. Lastly, all the movies (even E4-E6) sometimes do a poor job of indicating how much time has really passed. Do you really think that the hyperspace travel between Tattooine and Alderan in E4 took five minutes? There was even a thread on these forums not too long ago about E5 when Han and Leia decide to head to Bespin (Cloud City) and how long it took them to get there without Hyperdrive. My point is that I am with Seductivpancakes on this one, it was not as big a jump to the dark side as you are making it out to be.

I do not know that I agree with that. WAY back when the movies first came out, I read the ESB and RotJ novelizations and there were some interesting pieces to the stories that never made it into the movies. But as others have said, the Zahn trilogy is excellent.

The problem is that they've been there done that with SWG and it did not go over very well. One of the major issues with that time frame for games is no jedi. And let's face it, most gamers who want to play SW games want to be a jedi. Personally, at this point I think the best move for the SW franchise is to just live in the realm of novels and tabletop RPGs. We all have in our heads what Luke, Leia, Han, Chewy, Anakin, Obi Wan, Yoda, and even Bail Organa and Wedge Antilles, etc look and sound like. Creating a TV series with these characters (unless it is animated) will ruin what most of us think about when we hear Star Wars. With books the characters remain intact but the stories can continue.

Honestly, one of the first things I said to myself when i started playing was, "technology has not changed much in the thousands of years between SWTOR and the OT." But there is a simple explanation - familiarity. If ships and uniforms and technology are radically different then it is no longer "Star Wars". And as others have speculated there is a logical story based explanation too - at some point between TOR and the PT technologies were probably lost and rediscovered several times over.

There is a very simple explanation that no one has brought up yet... in the OT (all three movies), All the sets were built on sound stages in England, so most if not all the extras were British and therefore have that accent. Even the actor who played Darth Vader - David Prowse is British. James Earl Jones did the voice over for Vader only because after listening to the content, Lucas felt that Prowse's voice was not imposing enough. So with that in mind, for the sake of consistency most imperial voices in the PT and games and TV shows now have English/British accents.

While each jedi's lightsaber is intended to be unique, chances are pretty good that many looked alike. Furthermore, Anakin lost his lightsaber so many times throughout the Clone Wars the one Obi Wan gave to Luke was probably just a spare anyway. And no, Obi Wan did not stretch the truth, he outright lied. It was most likely Obi Wan who wanted to give the lightsaber to Luke ...when he was old enough but Uncle Owen wouldn't allow it.

In the movie "A New Hope" Han says that the Falcon did the "Kessel run" in less than 12 parsecs. Back in 1977 most thought that a parsec in this reference was a measure of time, when in fact it is a measure of distance (as it is in reality). In the Jedi Academy trilogy of novels this is clarified when the Kessel run is better described; Kessel sits in the middle of a cluster of black holes and due to "normal" speed limitations on ships a specific set of routes are laid out. However, due to the Falcon's speed Han is able to cut corners by getting closer to those black holes and shorten the distance he had to travel from the edge of the cluster to Kessel. In order to do this the Falcon has to be an incredibly fast ship even at sub-light speeds in order to get out of the gravity wells those black holes generate. Also what Annikhan says is 100% true. Due to the fact that after the decision is made to head to Bespin, the focus goes back to Luke and Yoda, there is no real way to know how much time has passed between when they start to when they arrive. Contributing to this is the fact that the Empire arrives before the Falcon does. To accomplish this, Boba Fett had to determine their likely destination, communicate with the empire, and the Empire then had to mobilize its forces to Bespin. Even with hyperdrive this takes time.