On Thursday, February 6th, 2025, while sitting in the office (as they are wont to do) the editors of Arthur had a revelation.

While the exact circumstances of said revelation were immediately lost to the mists of time, for the sake of a reasonably accurate historical reconstruction the below fascimile should suffice.

Abbigale: Hey, Evan, you know what I just realized?

Evan: What, Abby?

Abbigale: We never wrote that Book Club about Moby Dick.

Evan: Oh, yeah. Shit. I still have Andrew's copy of that.

Abbigale: Personally, I never finished [Moby Dick].

Evan: Well I guess that's just as well. Sort of too late to write about it now.

Abbigale: You know, I kind of miss writing those, even though one of us kind of hated each of the books that we read.

Evan: We read two books.

Abbigale: True. 

Evan: ...

Abbigale: ...

Evan: …

Abbigale: I need to start reading again.

Evan: Felt. I’m only reading for work or school these days. I tore through a book in like two days over winter break and everything since has been a slog.

Abbigale: I feel like I need to read something absolutely, despicably, incomprehensibly brainrotting. Just to finish it, you know?

Evan: Isn’t that what AO3 is for?

Abbigale: Ha! Those days are long behind me. Plus, I was a Wattpad girlie myself.

Evan: I see.

Abbigale: Maybe I should read the new Fourth Wing book. 

Evan: Jesus Christ.

Abbigale: Or the prequel to Priory of the Orange Tree. Something with dragons in it.  

Evan: Isn’t that the one that’s like ACOTAR?

Abbigale: Not really. It’s Gay. And it’s not like…smut. The Lesbian stuff doesn’t even happen till like, ⅔ of the way in.

Evan: It fascinates me how you are still a heterosexual woman. 

Abbigale: I think you’d really like The Priory of the Orange Tree.

Evan: Are you just saying that because I’m a lesbian?

Abbigale: No. It’s kind of like that book you read—the one with the boats.

Evan: The Terror?

Abbigale: No, with the twink, and the dragon.

Evan: Oh, Temeraire?

Abbigale: Hang on, how do you spell that?

Evan: T-M. Err shit. T-E-M-E-R-A-I-R-E. But the first one's called His Majesty's Dragon.

Abbigale: It’s about dragon riders, right?

Evan: I mean, kind of? Not really though. It’s like an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars, only all of the major imperial powers have air forces based around tamed dragons, but it’s not like dogfighting like Pern or How to Train Your Dragon, they’re like, MASSIVE fuck-large dragons. And they use the dragons like capital ships, like they each have a crew complement of gunners and bombers and officers and so on.

Instead of this one-on-one combat you have like, dragons going on bombing runs and artillery and cavalry and naval battles and this massive, large-scale warfare. It’s SICK.

Abbigale: Is there sex in it?

Evan: I mean like. Yes but it’s like, mostly fade-to-black like—these books aren’t about smut or banging, they’re about being, like, really autistic about the Age of Sail; and the collapse of empires; and the homoerotic tension between a bunch of these guys in the military hierarchy. It’s like Master & Commander meets Top Gun. 

Abbigale: I don’t know. I want something like…really mindless. 

Evan: I get that, I really do, but listen, Temeraire is just…it’s just good man. It feels good to read. I whip through those books. Like they’re superficially really dumb and impossible to sell to anyone but if you’re willing to buy into it I promise you’ll have a good time.

Abbigale: …

Evan: Hear me out. 

Abbigale: Okay.

Evan: What if we revived Book Club, but just did dragon books.

Abbigale: What do you mean?

Evan: We’ve got three months left in our contract. We read three books about dragons or dragon riders. We write about them. We each get to talk about a book or series that we really like, and it keeps us accountable to write.

Abbigale: …I’m with you so far.

Evan: We can get the staff in on it.

Abbigale: Like, make them read dragon porn?

Evan: Not make them, per se, but leave it open to invitation. If someone wants to contribute something one month, then they’re free to do so. Like Defector Music Club.

Abbigale: Hell. I’m game if you are.

Evan: Oh, Abby, I am so game.

—

That’s right, dear reader, Arthur Book Club returns with a vengeance. For the next three months we will be starting, hopefully finishing, and collating our thoughts about three fiction selections, all of which share the through line of being Books About Dragons.

For February, Abbigale has compelled us to read Samantha Shannon’s super sapphic ultra medieval romantasy smash-hit The Priory of the Orange Tree, a novel which is apparently even fruitier than its name implies.

Priory is a contemporary (in character, if not setting) gay revisionist feminist high-fantasy retelling of the legend of St. George and the dragon, albeit with every element Ship of Theseused to the point you would be forgiven for not recognizing, well, any of them.

This is the paragraph where I’d normally put a plot synopsis but honestly every summary of this book is so chock-full of vulgarized Celtic names that it’s sort of impossible to take seriously, so the broad premise of “gay dragon rider all-girl’s Catholic school” will have to do.

In case this doorstopper of a BookTok darling weren’t enough, we might (operative word: “might”) get around to talking about Shannon’s 2023 follow-up/stand-alone prequel to Priory, A Day of Fallen Night, which is legally classified as a weapon in some states because it is larger than the size of my head.

Tentative topics for this month’s reading include: BookTok and Abbigale’s dark and embarrassing history therein; historical revisionism and “feminist” retellings as a specifically modern phenomenon, with time reserved to once more trash The Song of Achilles along the way; the post-Harry Potter proliferation of books in desperate need of structural editors; and that irrepressible cultural institution which is yurislop.

In March, Evan is foisting Naomi Novik’s definitely-not-fanfiction historical fantasy Top Gun-like epic, His Majesty’s Dragon—the first novel of her sweeping nine-book Temeraire series—upon us, bringing new meaning to the term “weaponized autism” as she threatens to spend most of her word count talking about the intricacies of dragon-based combat and military engineering.

Temeraire takes place in an alternate history Europe at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, where empires clash for control of the continent and oceans are now battlefields.

On dispatch hunting French privateers, Captain William Laurence captures a frigate bound for Paris carrying a precious cargo: a live dragon egg. When the egg hatches and the dragon inside imprints on him, Laurence is forced into the harness to defend King and country alongside his new partner, the eccentric Chinese dragon Temeraire.

Prospective topics no doubt include: Genre fiction; “BoatTok,” and Evan’s longstanding fixation with the Age of Sail; author Naomi Novik’s history writing for the Dungeons & Dragons videogame Neverwinter Nights, and founding the Organization for Transformative Works (the company that runs AO3); urban, historial, and “low” fantasy in all its forms; fanfiction as a vessel for a career in “real” writing; and whether or not William Laurence gets pegged.

In April, despite our vocal protestations, we are resigning ourselves to Rebecca Yarros’ borderline pornographic “fly-or-die” heterosexual romantasy flight-school soap opera Fourth Wing, a book which combines elements of both of Book Club’s theretofore entries in a way neither editor claims to like.

Trying to read the plot summary of this novel actually gave me a headache, so the way I’ll frame it is that it’s a bit like Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the sense of taking a sword & sorcery magic school setting, nebulous quasi-medieval European politics, dragons, mommy issues, and a whole bunch of vulgarized Welsh names, throwing them in a blender, and generating a whole lot of angsty skin-slapping sex made more awkward by a telepathic connection!

And yet, despite how loudly and frequently we express our disdain for it, Abbigale knows far more about it than she’s willing to let on, and I have rarely passed up an opportunity to flip through a copy—be it at a bookstore or a friend’s apartment—and go “Wow! That’s a really emphatic description of this guy’s cock!”

Potential avenues of discourse include: contrasts (favourable or otherwise) to the prior two novels we’ll have so far read; the transposition of real-world context in fantasy settings; the intersections of art and pornography, and the cultural disdain for things that teenaged girls like; and last (but not least), the ethics of race fetishism (this book was written by a white woman). Yikes.

That said, another thing which these books all have in common is that they were written by WOMEN. Gasp—Arthur has gone full woke!

We’re sorry if we happened to skip over your favourite piece of dragon fiction, but it would of course be antifeminist of us to read The Hobbit. If you’re still mad take it up with our successors, cause come May we’ll be long gone, baby.

Probably.

Who’s to say—maybe (just maybe) we’ll come back to do Beowulf.