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Wednesday Reading Meme
(Pope Francis I, huh? Has a certain ring to it.)
What have you just finished reading?
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. Does eventually tell you what to do when things fall apart, thus useful.
What are you currently reading?
The Hobbit, more suited to these grey and fitful March days than My Name Is Red. There's a certain time-warp factor to rereading a book after 45 years-- I can *almost* see the world as it looked in 1966. If I reread LotR, I only see my other rereads: the last of which, granted, was a good decade ago.
The Invisible Library, about which I shall have questions for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
incandescens when she comes back. How does the Library define family if uncle-burdened Kai is considered to have none?
What will you read next?
Shall finish Red, as well as White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. Requires close attention, so is currently on the back burner. Then maybe some of those urban fantasies from the Kitchen Stack.
What have you just finished reading?
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. Does eventually tell you what to do when things fall apart, thus useful.
What are you currently reading?
The Hobbit, more suited to these grey and fitful March days than My Name Is Red. There's a certain time-warp factor to rereading a book after 45 years-- I can *almost* see the world as it looked in 1966. If I reread LotR, I only see my other rereads: the last of which, granted, was a good decade ago.
The Invisible Library, about which I shall have questions for
incandescens when she comes back. How does the Library define family if uncle-burdened Kai is considered to have none? What will you read next?
Shall finish Red, as well as White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi. Requires close attention, so is currently on the back burner. Then maybe some of those urban fantasies from the Kitchen Stack.
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Said local Librarian did not research matters as well as he might have. Kai, from his perspective, had heard a little about the Library (mentioned by his father or uncles, I think) and thought this a grand opportunity to spend a few years infiltrating it. He therefore claimed a total lack of family and indicated his willingness to be enrolled.
Of course, when some people higher up worked out who he was, his recruiter got several metaphorical rockets... hm, no, there was no actual punishment, because to do so would have been to make the whole thing significant, and the older Librarians who were In The Know didn't want to make it significant. They figured that Kai would do what the occasional other dragon who'd joined up has done - spend a few years working on the job, but decide that ultimately he couldn't take vows, and quietly leave while out in an alternate world somewhere. The Library's comfortable with that, as it maintains polite relationships with the draconic powers that be. The draconic powers that be are also reasonably happy with it, as it lets them keep a half-monitoring eye on the Library (or at least think that they're doing so) and the Library itself isn't getting too grabby.
It should be mentioned that Kai is the highest-ranking dragon ever yet to try this. Previously the highest-ranking has been the daughter of a duke or the son of a private secretary or similar. Not the eldest son of one of the Four Kings.
(I am also at some point going to have to work out the details of an antagonistic faction among the dragons, or at least one who is not particularly friendly to the Library or to our protagonists.)
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Another thing I'm not quite clear on. IIRC Irene comes back from her last trip with xeroxes of some volumes. Does the Library make copies where technologically feasible (or by hand where not? and then return to source?) Or does it actually steal mss on occasion? And how occasionally is on occasion?
He therefore claimed a total lack of family
Ohh- so that remark about Bradamant and his mother was him hastily adjusting tenses to conform with the Received Version, not an indication that Mother had recently deceased?
In your world male dragons do see their mothers from time to time, I take it? Or is the system patrilocal by then? And the world he comes from that's both tech and magic, is that his own world or an alternate where he'd taken up residence?
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To be fair, sometimes a Librarian has to exit in a hurry and doesn't have time to make a copy and take that instead. Conscientious Librarians in a situation of that sort try to make sure that a copy is made and that the original eventually gets back to the original world. Or at least that a copy gets back to the original world. Because, well, it would just be unfair to take someone's only copy of a good book.
With respect to Kai commenting re Bradamant and his mother, I think it was him hastily adjusting tenses. If I remember that bit correctly, he was uncomfortable at the time and trying to cover holes in his cover story.
The world where Kai was recruited from, that was both tech and magic, wasn't his own world. It was a high-law world, which lay within Gouen's - hm, call it a protectorate/kingdom/whatever - but it wasn't the world he was born on. Gouen was spending a few years there (sort of a summer holiday equivalent) and Kai was visiting him there, and that was where things kicked off for him. I'm making the assumption here that royal dragons (or at least, dragons of a certain degree of power) can travel between alternate worlds at will, though they perceive it in a different way to humans. High-powered Fae can also make their own passages. Librarians have to route everything through the Library.
I'm still working on the gender structure for dragons in my universe. I like the idea that royal dragons maintain mostly same-sex households, but that it is possible for a female dragon to declare herself as male, or vice versa, resulting in a scattering of genders in all royal households. I also like the idea that female dragons and male dragons have kingdoms in different areas (land dragons vs ocean dragons in your world) but that this is based on some sort of distinction of the stability (law vs chaos) of worlds which cannot be explained to human perceptions.
I think that male dragons do visit their mothers (and female ones their fathers), but that they are primarily raised in the household of the same-gender parent. But I see visiting between royal and noble households as being quite common among the younger dragons. Older ones would visit less frequently, and would announce their visits. Kai is still at the "young man dropping in with minimal announcement" stage of his life, though his rank does put some limits on him.
Does this make sense?
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I'm wondering a bit how dragons perceive these worlds/ dimensions. Do they think of them as dimensions per se, or have they come to do so over time, when either philosophy or physics required an explanation of why these different places were often enough variant versions of each other?
And sorry if I'm asking ahead of your theorizing, as readers are so tiresomely wont to do.
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Your questions are helpful. They're helping me work out some of the detail that I hadn't yet got fully decided, and also they're giving me an excuse to bounce dragon-related ideas off you and check how they feel. :)
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I am of course delighted to be of service. ^_^