Beyond Selidor

Yes, exactly. I'm curious about how the new expanded universe books are going, but the first ones published were written in a style that I knew was solid but that just wasn't compelling for me, and I'm not particularly interested in novels that just follow the movie characters (giving them backstory, etc.) right now, which is what the rest have been. Maybe I'll pick them up again eventually.

Yes! The Broken Earth trilogy has a lot of the same characteristics as Hurley's writing on the surface (apocalypse, human suffering, etc.), but uses it to form a narrative of people coming together and surviving and building towards a better world. Infinitely easier to read, because it isn't dragging me down. I get enough meaningless tragedy reading the news right now; I don't need it in my fiction too.