Okay, has anyone else ever seen something and suddenly realized that they’ve been wanting it forever even though they’d never heard of it before? About a month and a half ago, I heard about this:
It’s a book called “The Jedi Path” by Dan Wallace. Its conceit is that it’s written as a textbook for the Jedi, handed down through several generations with their notes collected in the liner spaces, and this edition has a vault, a bunch of little doodads stuck in the pages, etc. Me being me, I had to have it. I got it in the mail today and have been reading it all evening.
It’s pretty much perfect. The author, Dan Wallace, has done a lot of writing for the RPG sourcebooks and I think this served him well in trying to write something like sixteen different voices (seven Jedi Masters who wrote the actual textbook, as well as the assenting and dissenting voices in notes: Yoda, Thame Cerulian, Dooku, Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano, Darth Sidious, and Luke Skywalker.) There’s a lot of cool illustrations by artists that I like and respect, but the real meat for me is the notes. The point of the text is for the reader to decide for themselves where the old Jedi Masters were correct and where they were waaaaaaay off–when you find yourself agreeing with someone’s notes, it’s always interesting to see who you’re agreeing with, given what we do or don’t know about their lives. It comes together as a fun read and a great thought exercise, if you (like me) are at all prone to long-winded meandering philosophical conversations about the nature of the Force and the Jedi.
It’s expensive as frak right now, because it comes in a mechanized little vault that makes noise and lights up and looks generally awesome (and has those little doodads in the pages), but there might be a stripped-down edition in the future with just the book. If you can get your hands on it at some point, it’s really worth a read.