I don’t know if I really haven’t re-read any of Anne McCaffery’s Pern books in four years. It’s plausible. Although it’s also plausible that I did and kept it a deep, dark secret. And if I really didn’t read them, why do I have a paperback of Dragonsinger? Well, anyway. I was feeling lousy, and wanted to soak in the tub and read something comforting, and that hit the proverbial.
I loved these books when I was a little one. It’s embarrassing now. The character is just a trifle Mary Sue, if you know what I mean. She turns out to be good at everything, and everybody who likes her is a good guy, and everybody who is mean to her is bad, and people keep giving her things, and the Head of Everything Good in the World thinks she is wonderful and special and spends all his free time with her.
Which is very nice and comforting and empowering and all that shit. But also just a little embarrassing, now that I’m thirty-glob.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
If you want to present reading Dragonsinger in a less embarrassing way, you might talk about dialogue, which is what I re-read it for, from time to time. Maybe my sense of its worth is all nostalgic recollection from a time when I nearly had the book memorized, but it still seems _lively_ to me in a way that is unlike any other of Anne McCaffrey’s works. There is some of that spirit in the early Pern books, but they are too involved with the serious business of saving the world from Thread to have the sustained liveliness that blossoms at the Harper Craft Hall.
The “people who like Menolly are good; people who don’t like Menolly are bad” is rather juvenile, and unfortunately that’s the part of the book that carries over most into the later Pern books. McCaffrey’s descent into ever flatter black-and-white, mean-spirited moralizing based on who agrees with her heroes is one of the many things that make those books completely unreadable, especially when it is played out on the scale of global politics.
Oddly, I think it’s probably also one of the things that make those books so attractive to the 13-15 y.o. set.
Perhaps not so oddly.
Anyway, I read the Dragonriders books (enjoying the first and the last one, mostly) at the optimal age, but I didn’t get to the Harper Hall series until later, and I must have found them more-or-less as you describe, since I never finished one of them. However, around the time I gave up on the Harper books, I played a role playing game set in a faintly space opera-ish universe, and our ship crash-landed on Pern. The DM handled it cagily, and when I figured out what he was doing, it was totally cool. Unfortunately, that was the night of my first-ever migraine, and I was unable to pick the game up again later. Fun, though.
peace
Matt
I read the Dragonriders books (enjoying the first and the last one, mostly) at the optimal age
What do you mean by “the last one”? It’s never been quite clear which one was going to be the last, has it?
I was referring to The White Dragon. The “last one” is of course the last one I read. Everyone knows that!
peace
Matt