This is the fourth installment of What Tax Profs Are Reading. The goal is to share with the broader tax community reviews of both tax-related and nontax-related books recently read by tax professors. We invite tax professors to submit book reviews for publication on TaxProf Blog.

Jim Maule (Villanova) shares with us his thoughts on Dragon’s Kin (Del Rey, 2003) by Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd McCaffrey:

Collaborating for the first time with her son, the veteran weaver of the tales of the dragons, dragon riders, and folk of Pern has again produced a tough-to-put-down and fun escape. Escape it is, another in one of perhaps only two series of science fiction that for some reason grips me. The other, the Lensman series by e.e. “doc” Smith wirtten in the 60s (and which came to me courtesy of my older brother to the chagrin of my parents who thought science fiction was a distraction from stuff really worth reading), defies comparison for it was written in a different era when science was viewed more favorably than it sometimes is today.

McCaffrey’s stories are set in the future but involve colonizers of a planet who reject most technology and return to a less complex way of life, only, of course, to be hit with unexpected challenges and solutions found in telepathic dragons whose abilities reflect the application of science much more advanced than today’s. McCaffrey gives personalities to her characters that make them seem real, and she lets the usual human problems of greed, deceit, and stupidity conflict with the better qualities of diligence, duty, and love in ways that suggest some things don’t change much. What I like about this series is that she writes them out of sequence. “Dragon’s Kin” is set so that if the books had been released in chronological order it would have been among the first.

McCaffrey uses this technique so that things not understood in an earlier (but later in time) book are explained in the later volume. Surely not an original idea, but it works well. I met the dragons of Pern when I picked up a book from a friend’s bookshelf while visiting at the seashore, and (this is tough even for me to comprehend so, yes, it seems strange) I had some free time on my hands. Suffice it to say I have an entire shelf in one of the built-in display bookcases in my living room filled with the Pern materials, which might break the “show the classics” rule but I’d rather let my display bookcases show myself.

So my ‘to read” pile has shrunk by two books. It remains in the hundreds. I’m almost finished a third (I have this habit of reading more than one book at a time, a tough to abandon habit left over from taking multiple courses in a semester) and I’ll write that one up when I’m finished. It’s not tax, not a biography, not family history, and not science fiction. I’ll leave it at that.

For prior TaxProf Book Reviews, see:
• Jim Maule’s review of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
• Paul Caron’s review of Courting the Yankees: Legal Essays on the Bronx Bombers
• Joel Newman’s review of Perfectly Legal