While my nonfiction reads are trending between “omg digging in” and “omg i need inspiration/healing,” my fiction tastes are trending very, VERY escapist.
I’ve been a sucker for dragon books since elementary school, and today I found myself giving an overly detailed description of my three favorite dragon book series to my sister Miranda Cook, who incidentally, was not actually asking for it. She was an innocent bystander in a drive-by book recommending.
Something I’ve always loved about reading is that it can give your brain and soul a much-needed break from the sometimes too-overwhelming reality of the moment. For awhile, as an adult, I started to feel like this was a “guilty pleasure.” That escaping to another world was an unnecessary luxury when so much work needs to be done.
But that’s coming from someplace silly that devalues art and literature and imagination. Reading anything you like reading is a good thing. A great thing.
And so, DRAGONS!
For no reason other than imagination is a good place to be right now, here’s my top three dragon book series.
- The Temeraire series of nine books by Naomi Novik. Starting with “His Majesty’s Dragon,” I love the personality Naomi Novik imbues her dragons with the most, and the relationship they have with their riders. But it also imagines a fun premise – what if the Napoleonic wars happened… but with dragons?
- Mercedes Lackey’s series The Dragon Jousters starts with “Joust,” and has some of the most tangible world building of fantasy series I’ve read. It’s a different world than ours, but you can imagine yourself there, along for the ride. It’s a very digestible four-book series.
- Probably the series that got me most into dragons in high school was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. I devoured anything McCaffrey I could get my hands on for awhile, as she builds very addictive worlds. The Dragonriders series you can pick up almost any of the 24(!) books in the series and start there. I read “The White Dragon” first, but “Dragonflight” is the first she wrote.