Best Mass Effect book / collection?

Revelation is good, though the rest of the MW books are skippable. Probably for the best. Revelation gives us some context between Anderson and Saren. It also shows that humanity was interested in AI from the start. Hence, EDI (even as the rogue VI) and SAM coming into being with secret funding.

Nexus Uprising was also good and gave some insight into some of the characters. It made me dislike the ones I already disliked even more. Two of them could have averted the fight rather than make it worse. One stayed on the Nexus and one became a brutal dictator.

I won't read Annihilation because it was supposed to be a DLC and I'm stubborn.

I appreciate Drew Karpyshyn's ME books almost as much as his Darth Bane trilogy.

While not as good, Deception is still an interesting read. Kai Leng eating Anderson's cereal is a funny and amazingly silly lore tidbit I'll always remember.

You're optimistic that that ever will be wrapped up. Regardless, the book stands on its own and is worth the read.

Both of those series have good stories but the actual writing was painfully bad in many places. (Yes, I know they’re tie-in/merchandising books, but still.)

I don’t mean that so much as a criticism of Karpyshyn as a recognition of how many people’s work goes into making a video game story come about. A game story writer doesn’t need to be good at descriptive prose, for instance, because as long as he can get the point across, the artists can handle it, etc.

I quite liked the book but it was clearly written completely separately from the game’s writing process (or the game diverged in the mean time) because it doesn’t match up much at all. Book Sloan is a well written and interesting character. Game Sloan is a B-movie reject.