Hi guys.

I'm reading Cornelia Funke, Dracheneriter in translation, and I really enjoy it. Also, I really like it as a children's book: this is the kind of book I'd recommend my nine year old self to read (not that I can complain about the books I had). Don't spoil it yet, I've only read two third of it so far.

It's also funny to read after Sapkowski, when both of them talk about an Earth where humans are talking over everything and all the fairy creatures are disappearing, and with a gold dragon appearing in both.

The Reading Room (the Lit SE chat room) recommended this one to me.

@Randal'Thor

Ooh, it's a long time since I read that one.

@b_jonas Heh. Two very different "gold dragon" characters, as I recall.

The human protagonist Ben is built as an audience surrogate. His age is never mentioned, my best guess is 14 years. He has a mysterious background. His appearance is never described in text, apart from being white skinned. While the book has a few illustrations by the author, so those could give a canon appearance to him, he actually looks different on different pictures. He comes somewhere from Europe, and there are some clues as for where, I'm still not sure what it is.

My current guess is that he's British, but I'd have to reread the book to pick up all the clues.

I think my favourite character was Twigleg.

But I wouldn't read the book again now, because it would probably seem very childish to me.

@Randal'Thor I don't find it's childish. That's why I'm saying it's a good children's book.

It's written in a simple style that I could understand as children, and even the story is a somewhat childish one with not much serious drama or scares, but still, it's not one of the condescending children's books or the ones that try to teach a lesson or somethign.

Whaaaaat? There's a sequel?!

@Randal'Thor No, it's the other book (Tintenherz) that has a sequel.

Two sequels, but they aren't translated, so I can't read them.

> In late 2015, Cornelia Funke divulged details on a sequel to Dragon Rider, titled A Griffin's Feather. [...] The book was published in Germany under the title Drachenreiter: Die Feder eines Greifs on 23 September 2016, with the hopes of releasing it in English the following year in 2017. Dragon Rider: The Griffin's Feather was published on 5 July 2017.

He's written a few more books though, I've seen them on the library shelf, and after these two I'll sure to look what they are.

@Randal'Thor Interesting.

From Wikipedia. I removed the sentence that might spoil the first book for you.

I felt like Dragon Rider wrapped up its story well, so it's possible the sequel might feel like a cash-in rather than a natural continuation of the tale.

@b_jonas They're translated into English.

Oh by the way, the translated edition sucks. The translator has done a good job, but then the acutal printed book has a lot of annoying errors. Stray hyphens that look like they were trying to introduce hyphenation points manually, minor typos, there's even a few lines missing at a page boundary at some point, and a few lines repeated a few pages later.

Mind you, the translated ed'n of Tintenherz was even worse.

@Randal'Thor Yes, but … I usually don't really like to read books translated to English from a foreign language.

Fair enough.

Also, yesterday I was reading this one together (as in the same place and occasionally talking) with a lad who was reading one of the books in Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series. I gave up reading that one in Hungarian because the translation is bad, but I'd still like to read all of it in original if I can get my hands on a whole series somehow.

(And no, I don't care about the movie. I only want the books.)

To be clear, Drachenreiter was translated to Hungarian only in 2002, so my child self could not have read it.

And even the original is from 1997.

Heh, here I was waiting to give a comment complimenting an interesting question...and then I remembered that the feed was killed off. ;-)