Very nice, my well-informed friend. But Queen Daenerys OWNS dragons. She is the quintessential authority on dragons. She is the Mother of Dragons. Her answer to this question? "ANYTHING THEY WANT".
When you do fantasy, you can make dragons eat only ice cream if you want to, I guess. Dragonriders of Pern sounds wonderful. I would read something like that if I had time and a few more lifetimes to spare. I just don't read books any more. I used to read as many as 50 books a year, easy. I don't even read one book a year now. I am devolving and I am too busy to do anything any more except knee-jerk entertainment like this site. Or the news. Or Work. That is my boring existence.
I could see "frost" dragons eating ice cream ... and being immune to "brain freeze". lol
I used to be a voracious reader. I read so many books, they stopped letting me enter those contests in elementary/middle school about how many books you could read during summer vacation. I averaged 3 books a day, by the time I was in middle school. I had read literally every book in the town library, at least once, by the time I graduated high school. With work and stuff now ... I read 1-2 books a week. If I didn't have a Kindle, I'd have to travel a couple hundred miles to get to a bookstore.
lol ... that's true, it could have been a small 1-room city library. But while it wasn't the size of the NYC Public Library ... it was a good-sized one.
It looks a lot like the one I grew up in. I just found a pic that's recent. I used this one in Northlake, Illinois, mostly in grade school and then I used the school libraries.
That's amazing, Walt. I have heard stories of such readers, but would sooner have believed dragons to be real!
May I ask, not exactly where you live, but how you've ended up so far from any bookstore, and how that distance suits you? I'm about to move to the Serbian countryside myself, you see, never having spent more than 6 weeks at a time in such places.
He inspired to look up the one I grew up around. They remodeled it since 1960, obviously. But it looks a lot like Walt's. Small town libraries are all the same, I guess.
There used to be a couple mom-and-pop bookstores at a local mall in the 1970s ... but that was torn down in the 1980s to create an "open" mall (similar to a strip mall, but more spread out). When it was torn down, the little bookstore couldn't afford the higher rent of the other local mall (which also had two chain bookstores). The chain bookstores, like most stores in the other mall, couldn't afford the higher rents that started in the early 2000s ... and closed. Now the only bookstore in the local area is a small used-book store, that the person runs out of 1/2 of their house - and it's only open when they feel like working.
So if someone in the area wants a book - it's either travel to the nearest metro area, or order from Amazon.
It may be a fallacy, but I feel like the reading habits of a nation/populace/community speak volumes. In Bosnia, one can come across kiosks selling classic literature in rather unexpected, remote places. Not that many locals don't shiver at the thought of opening a book.
In the last couple years, I've noticed a growing number of "mini-libraries". They're usually in front of someone's house. Each one holds about a dozen books - and operate on the theory of "take a book, leave a book".
Unfortunately, I've also seen homeless take the books for kindling.
Element 99 