D is for –

The Letter

happily brings you today’s post.

Obviously, D is for Dragon. Just look at the Dragon lurking in the letter.

Last week I mentioned that dragons were a theme of my 2011 reading. Dragons are a general theme in my reading. I like books about dragons. If I am reading a book and a dragon shows up, that raises the book in my estimation. For example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has dragon’s eggs AND dragons. This was a lovely surprise when I first read the books. I read Eragon because it had dragons. I’ve got a picture book that I’ve had for a long, long time called Sir Kevin of Devon which features a dragon. I’m pretty sure I liked the book because of the dragon. In the Narnia books, Eustace gets turned into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This is my favourite part of that book. (The movie ruined it entirely, bad theology, too much dragon.)

If I know a book has a dragon, I’m on it. I just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. D is definitely for Dragon.

Day 10: Here Be Dragons

The first gift in today’s version of the 12 Days of Christmas, featuring the characters from Shrek, is

A Dragon!

What fun. Today is also the first time the featured song fits with what I’m writing about. Good thing I finally got my act together.

Dragons were a bit of a theme in my reading in 2011. I started off the year by reading the first three of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon. In the summer I read a memoir called Chasing the Dragon about a woman who lived in Hong Kong and started a drug rehab ministry there. “Chasing the Dragon” is a Cantonese slang term that refers to aspects of using heroin/opium. Then in the fall I read the first four books of George R.R. Martin’s “Song of Fire and Ice” series — and there are many dragon stories and dragon bones and dragon eggs in that series. The fifth book (as yet I haven’t read it) even has a dragon in the title. I admit that the title dragon was one reason I picked up the series.

I started 2011 thinking I’d read more about dragons than I did. Why you might ask. Good question. The best answer I can give at this point is research. Huh? Yep. Research. Not sure what exactly will come of the dragon research, but there it is, I’m doing research into dragons. Got any book recommendations? Movies?

I haven’t yet seen the movie about training your dragon, nor have I read Inheritance yet, those are both on my list of dragon-research-related tasks. One of my questions in this research is are dragons good or evil? Or, are dragons ambivalent and it depends on their context whether they are good or evil? Is there a strong tradition of dragons=evil? If so, how has this shifted so that dragons are now sometimes good? You may think these are ridiculous questions, or, you may have some interesting opinions. Feel free to opine away. That is what the comments are for.