Star Wars: The Han Solo Adventures (A Del Rey Book) (edition 1992)

Way back before the Star Wars Expanded Universe became an industry unto itself, you only had two options: Alan Dean Foster's psychedelically weird Splinter of the Mind's Eye and Brian Daley's Han Solo trilogy. Looking back at these short novels almost 30 years later, I was quite impressed at how clever, imaginative, and sophisticated they really are, even if they're probably of limited interest to most. ( )

OK, so it's just adventure, and somewhat campy adventure at that ... I like it anyway. In each of these stories, which take place in the years before Episode IV, you see traces of the buried altrustic streak that prompted Han to stick around and intervene at the Death Star. (I hope that's not a spoiler for anyone.) ( )