2026 reread

Some notes from the reread in the Wookies and Bookies book club…

Prologue

Love the image of Sith past (and present?) recognizing and reveling in the ascendancy of Sidious. 

Chilling. Awesome. 😁

Chapter 1

Kinda wild how Plagueis didn’t even sense what he would do until the time came, but Tenebrous did.

Chapter 2

Wow. He is alone alone, like, it’s just him, no other true Sith Lords out there. I can’t imagine he’s “lonely”, just alone. Or lone. (“Can you just be ‘whelmed’?” 😂)

Anyway, his thoughts about how things happened with his master, how the Force provided a way for him in the moment he wasn’t planning on, etc. so different than the Jedi, but no less Force.

Chapter 4

Interesting observation about how the midi-chlorians were essentially fated to leave the crew the when Plagueis chose the ship. 

These folks are gonna be dead, midi-chlorians start packing their bags.

Chapter 5

Really cool concept and image of that “rend” turning to a gaping hole.

Chapter 6

Politics over brute force, ruling with fear. Classic Sith.

Chapter 8

Oh man. I enjoyed this chapter. Plagueis clearing the deck of all potential competitors. Ruthless.

Chapter 9

They meet! 💥 

Made me think of these lines from Harry Potter:

“Did you know— then?” asked Harry.

“Did I know that I had just met the most dangerous Dark wizard of all time? No.”

If you’re THE Dark Lord of the Sith, do you know when you meet the apprentice who will eventually kill you?

What a wild life.

One other book club member said: “This is always what I find so odd about the Sith path. For a path that seems to value power above all else, it seems counterintuitive to cultivate your own successor and assassin.”

I think the Bane trilogy (at least the first two books, gotta read the third one still!) lay this out pretty well:

• one to hold the power
• one to crave the power

It’s the Dark Side, so according to Bane, that craving increases the power of the dark side in both the master and apprentice, like a symbiotic relationship, where the parasite eventually kills the host. 

The power is greater with that envy and animosity between master and apprentice, something the Sith Lords were lacking in Bane’s time. 

Yeah, super weird and counterintuitive but they couldn’t be as powerful without it.

Chapter 12

I love how much observation and critique of human beings there is in this book. Nothing like an “alien” to expose how fragile we are.

Hard to tell. Humans are their own worst enemies. Your body isn’t meant to withstand real punishment. It is easily injured and slow to heal. Your olfactory and tactile senses are relatively acute, but your auditory and visual senses…

Chapter 13

It’s incredibly important to be able to recognize that this is not the right, good, or just way. It’s easy to rationalize and relativize it all to fit a worldview (galaxyview?), but ultimately this is not the path we should be taking. 

What a great window into the mind of a Sith Lord.

George Lucas definitely modeled the empire after fascist movements (“space nazis”), and you see that Sidious takes it even further, like his father, where non-humans don’t really have a place in the empire.