From anyone who has read Tarkin, how was the Empire portrayed? Was it the unreasonably evil empire? or were they still ruthless, but arguably justified?

My biggest hope for the news episodes is that the "We are the evil empire for no real reason" mantra dies

Tarkin (Character and book) was interesting. The Empire is depicted as a struggle of all against all, with the Victor being adjudicated by the Emperor. It was a fairly realistic look of the way fascist societies operate on the basis of will to power.

The book itself was... Not great. The author seemed to pick through a thesaurus to find words that almost worked in context. Between the mediocre writing of Tarkin and New Dawn, I'm quickly loosing my enthusiasm for Star Wars novels. Fortunately the cartoon is much better.

I read a bunch of the EU novels and comics back in the 90's, and they were very hit or miss. Like many others, the Thrawn trilogy is what got me back into Star Wars, it really breathed new life into the universe, so I think it's still a significant series in that respect, and any fan should check it out. If you're a slow reader, and you don't have a lot of free time to read the entire Thrawn series, there is a dark horse comics adaptation (illustrated by one of my absolute favorite comic artists, Olivier Vatine), and there's also audiobooks (I think one of them is up on youtube even).

In my opinion even the best of the EU is mediocre science fiction, so if I'm going to take to the time to read a novel, there's a lot of other sci-fi that I'm going to read first. That said, I'm really interested in Aftermath, so it will probably be the first Star Wars book I'll read in over 15 years.