Eragon and Eldest are always going to be one of those books that brought me to reading (right after Harry Potter), so there is a lot of nostalgia involved when I read them.

Eldest holds its own on re-read thought. You can see the improvements in writing and story building. Now, I know a lot of people get bored with Roran's POV, but I think it's important for the story. It gives it more depth, showing the lives of the common people, those that are going to get swept into this war of magic and dragons.

I also liked Eragon's studying. There is quite a big focus on him learning to think and understanding why he fights his enemy. And it changes his character noticeably. I am not saying it's rare, but a lot of fantasy training focuses mostly on how to swing the sword and throw magic spells. ( )

Fantasy

This book starts out rather slow. Once you've read past the first half the story gets increasingly interesting. ( )

Re-reading this book. it was far slower than I remembered, and I actually had to take a break half way through. All of the plot was necessary and there isn't really antyhing taht I would cut out but the first three quarters of the book are just a real slog. That last quarter thoguh picks up and makes you really excited for the next book again. Excited to continue my reread of this series considering everything i thought i remembered has already happened, but there's still two books left! ( )

I first read this when I was around 16 or 17. I loved it back then. I was meh about book 3 and found book 4 dull as dishwater at best.

It’s no longer 2005. It’s a bad book. Or at least the first 34% of it is. Maybe it improves in the last 2/3rds of the story. It takes far too long to read so I’ve given up. I took a break to read a book by a different author during lunch, and realized after I stopped, "Books... can be good?" And that is the mindset I have going into this novel.

The writing is simultaneously better than “Eragon” because it is more consistent, while also being worse because the writing is still bad, but it’s just bad in a way that is stylistically consistent. And it buckles down on Paolini’s bad quirks, one of which was the weird way he tries to do pseudo-fantasy dialogue. Like… imagine the weird way Saphira talks in book 1, but that’s the entire novel. I also don’t know what it is about weather or landscapes that brings out the worst in Paolini’s writing, but boy does he know how to make neat things like storms, rivers, and bodies of water sound grotesque or utterly stupid.

The kind of prose you can expect in this novel: “Each was more fair and noble than any human Eragon had seen, albeit in a rarefied, exotic manner.”

The same problems “Eragon” has are still present: wordiness, weird metaphors and similes, wonky description, bizarre characterization, awkward and cringe-worthy dialogue… Eragon is still an arrogant asshole, he’s just also nihilistic. And then he’s forced to become vegetarian lol. Saphira is still an arrogant asshole deux ex machina who now also slut-shames women.

But this novel we get the second worst character in the story: Roran, whom I’ve hated since the book first released. (Remember, Roran is only SECOND-worst because Eragon exists; actually I can’t decide which of them is worse, that’s a difficult competition). He’s grumpy, boring, rude, arrogant, and stupid. His entire plotline drags and grinds the story to a halt. He’s not a compelling character and you’re left wondering for every section he has “why… is this a thing?” What does he add to the story? This isn’t “what if Boromir lived”. This is “I’m very bored with the central premise of my story so I’m going to take a break so we can focus on this angry miller who’s just… frustrated by being poor”, which could be fascinating! If written by any other author!

I mean he hates Eragon, so I guess we can agree on something. But he hates Eragon for kind of silly reasons.

I honestly feel bad for Katrina, who’s been brainwashed by her father and patriarchal society in general to feel like a heifer being sold to the highest bidder. She has no personality. She is simply Roran’s love interest and goal. In some stories, the characters just like… like each other. Particularly when everyone could die. In this book, we are very worried about all the material goods Katrina has or does not have.

Orik and the other dwarves went from being vaguely interesting to bouncy fantasy characters who are overly hyper and too wordy and way too respectful of a literal 16-year-old and baby dragon who are both way too arrogant and dumb for the respect they’re given. Literally, the entire story is “and why were these two not packed up and shipped off to Ellesmera? Seriously? They’re causing so much damage? What little political pull they might have is not outweighed by how dangerous they are???”

And Nasuada. One of the worst-written characters in the story. Where the bad writing truly shines at its ugliest. She’s not a reprehensible character. She’s just stupid and talks nonsense.

I also realized while reading this that a good chunk of Vrael’s backstory is just a ripoff of Valen’s backstory from “Babylon 5”. While on the PR tour for his recent SF novel, Paolini noted that Kosh and G’Kar were two of his favorite aliens, and listed BB5 as one of his influences. While that might mean he just watched it in the lead-up to writing that novel, I highly doubt that, given the blatant similarities between the two.

I simply cannot reread one of the dullest and worst written books I've read in a while. Not even Angela being excited to talk to Eragon about how awesome the word "flaccid" is can tempt me to finish. Goodbye and good riddance.

I wouldn't let the successively higher overall ratings on this quadrilogy fool you into thinking that Paolini improves as the series goes along. Ignore my criticisms if you want, and the apparently unchanged 2% of people who 1-stared books 3-4, but I think there's a different reason for why that rating goes up as you go along. “Eragon” has a 3.92, “Eldest” has a 3.99, “Brisingr” has a 4.05, and “Inheritance” has a 4.09. However, there’s an inverse correlation with how many people rated the books. 1.5 million people rated “Eragon”, 397,889 rated “Eldest”, 337,835 rated “Brisingr”, and 245,061 rated “Inheritance”. The percentage of low reviews drops by around 2% as you switch from “Eragon” to "Eldest" and the sequels (though it remains a steady 2% or roughly 6k for each sequel). And while you could theorize that a lot of people just rate the first novel in a series as their stand-in for the series, I hazard that a lot of people just don’t read the rest of the series, whether or not they liked it, and typically only people who like it already want to finish. Hence, why the ratings improve nearer the end of the series. By that point, most of those who are left are people who loved the series enough to stick around. That doesn’t mean Paolini improved - because he didn’t - that just means that the people who liked the story liked it enough to not care. To them, he didn’t need to improve. Or they didn't finish it, or didn't want to mar a series they otherwise liked with a low rating. If the same number of people who gave “Eragon” a 1 star rating did the same for “Inheritance”, that’d be a quarter of the book’s ratings. That’s how much fewer people read it by Goodreads’ numbers. That smaller number doesn't necessarily mean more people disliked books 2-4 than book 1, or fewer people read those entries in the series, but it does seem to indicate that far fewer people cared either way to rate those later entries.

Also interestingly: the sequel anthology has a 3.81 rating, which is lower even than “Eragon”, and only 17,661 ratings, despite releasing in 2018 for a series that is as popular as this purportedly is. While 1 star ratings are the lowest percentage on that book, 3 star ratings are the second highest, surpassing five star ratings. I don’t know what happened with the avid fans between 2011 and 2018, but it doesn’t look like it was enough to keep them invested. ( )