The best books that showcase different kinds of dragons

I was first introduced to The Hobbit by my third-grade teacher, Mr. York, who read it aloud to my class. Being small for my age, and a bit of a shy homebody, I related to this inconsequential hobbit who missed his second breakfast and longed for a good pocket handkerchief as he became swept up in the terrifying events of the world outside the safety of his cozy hobbit hole. This book taught me that heroes come in many forms. That I, too, could brave the dragon’s den. That invisibility might actually be a magic power. It taught me that fairytales were for grown-ups, too, no matter what the grown-ups said. And it forever seared the great dragon, Smaug, into my mind as the quintessential dragon—huge, ferocious, clever, and insightful, a primordial force of nature worthy of respect, even from those who strove to defeat him.

I read The Hero and the Crown as a socially awkward adolescent who, like Aerin, the protagonist, struggled to fit in. I loved how Aerin turned her back on social expectations and used her ingenuity to carve a place for herself, taking on a role no one else wanted—dragonslayer. The great dragons had long ago been hunted to extinction, leaving behind only their smaller cousins, mere vermin, that occasionally troubled the peasants, but were hardly worth the notice of the noble warriors. These were small battles, but they needed fighting. And through fighting the small battles, Aerin found herself prepared to be the hero her people needed when the great dragon Maur awoke. That, too, was a lesson, and a dragon, I carried with me into later life.

When I began devouring Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels, I was a teenager heading into young adulthood. My world was trying to convince me to grow up and leave behind the realms of elves and dwarves and fairytales and emerge into the enlightened lands of science and rationality. I was delighted to find dragons waiting for me there, too. McCaffrey’s dragons are genetically modified indigenous creatures of an alien planet, shaped by humans to be larger and more intelligent so they can carry riders and protect the human settlers from the dangerous Threads, an alien lifeform that periodically rains down from a rogue planet passing too close in its erratic orbit.

I first met the dragon Temeraire in audiobook form. I was a busy stay-at-home mother wrangling two non-neurotypical children with conflicting needs. It was not the world I had prepared for, and I had my hands too full to do much reading—but I could still listen. Temeraire was living in his own alternate-history world. While still in his egg, he had been sent as a gift from China to Emperor Napoleon, but his ship was captured en route. When he hatched, he found himself bonded to an Englishman and placed in service in the British Aerial Corps during the Napoleonic Wars. His new captain, having transferred from the Navy, didn’t know what he was doing in his dragon-rearing any more than I did in my child-rearing. But we both managed to get our crews organized and into the fray.

The dragons of the Rain Wild Chronicles are a transformational lot, hatching from their eggs as sea serpents and living in the oceans until they are big enough to swim upriver, where they form cocoons and later emerge in their great, flying reptilian forms. But these dragons went extinct in a massive volcanic upheaval—until one cocoon, long-buried in the rubble of an ancient Elderling city, is at last exposed to sunlight. And as fate would have it, I met these dragons during a transitional time in my own life. My children were growing up, and I had more time for books. But now, I was joined by my husband, who read to me while I cooked supper. Assigned high-school reading had convinced him he didn’t like books, but I lured him in with ‘real’ books about ‘real’ things. Like dragons. Mwaha. And when I started writing them myself, he supported me wholeheartedly.