Eragon

A big, warm, intoxicating fantasy adventure that knows exactly how to hook the part of your brain that still believes in dragons.
Eragon starts as a farm boy who finds a mysterious blue stone in the woods. It hatches. Suddenly he is bound to a dragon and shoved out of his ordinary life and into an Empire built on fear, magic, and a king who wants absolute control.
What makes this book work is the bond at the center of it. Eragon’s growth is not just about power leveling into a hero. It is about being terrified, being stubborn, being lonely, and being forced to become someone worthy of the creature who chose him. Saphira is not a pet or a plot device. She has presence. Pride. Temper. The relationship feels like two minds learning each show more other in real time, and that keeps the story emotionally grounded even when the stakes go mythic.
The mentor figure, Brom, is another strength. He carries that old storyteller gravitas without turning into a cardboard wise man, and the way he pushes Eragon feels less like training montage and more like an argument about what responsibility costs. The book keeps returning to that question. What does it mean to have power and still be a decent person. What does it mean to inherit a legacy you did not ask for. What do you owe to strangers when the world is burning.
The prose is straightforward, sometimes almost earnest to a fault, and the early pacing can feel like it is carefully laying track before the train finally decides to move. When it hits its stride, it delivers. The action reads clean. The world has texture. The sense of journey is unputdownable.
One critique. The story leans hard into familiar mythic shapes, and some side characters, especially the women, can feel more like symbols than fully lived in people at this stage.
Still, I finished this book wanting the next one immediately. show less

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#1 Eragon - ★★★★★
#2 Eldest - TBR


I cannot believe it took me this long to finally mark Eragon as a read book. This book has been on my shelves for way too long and I am happy I finally got to it.

Knowing how saturated the fantasy genre is today, I was apprehensive going into the book. The boy and the dragon story have been used very frequently. But as soon as I read the first few chapters, I was transported to Eragon’s farm in Carvahall, joined his adventure and never looked back.

Eragon is just a boy on a farm, doing his bit to help his uncle. When one day he finds a shiny blue egg, he is sure he can sell it in town and buy food for the winter. But as soon as people show more find out he got it from the Spine, they want nothing to do with it. So Eragon decides to keep it for a bit, until he can find a buyer. When the egg cracks and a dragon is hatched, Eragon’s whole world is about to change. He knows a few things: he has a special connection with the dragon through his mind and he is in big danger. Along the way, an old man called Brom offers Eragon help and knowledge, and we find out so much more about dragons, Dragon Riders, magic and all the dangers Eragon Is about to face for being a Dragon Rider in his time, when the king is searching for him.

From one adventure into another, the book is quite rich with action, stories, and interesting characters. I really liked Angela and the merecat, as well as the Twins. They seemed quite interesting, although I can’t say I trust them. I liked Brom and Murdoch too – their knowledge and experience in different topics intrigued me.

The magic in Eragon was a cool concept.

I liked the Ancient language and the fact that you have to know certain words to cast a spell. I also liked that you cannot lie in the Ancient language, although I’ve seen that before in other lore that features elves. And I was also quite intrigued by the “true name” and the power it held, the possible duels and the rules on how magic works from a distance. The magic concept in Eragon intrigued me a lot and I loved that.

Be prepared to watch Eragon learn about who he is now, his legacy and his powers. And watch him try to choose what allegiance he should aid, and how involved he wants to be. The Spiderman quote “with great power comes great responsibility” rings very true in this book.

Eragon’s dragon, Saphira, is also a big character. She has great powers and ancient wisdom, and together with Eragon they make a great team. They share a unique bond and I’m excited to see how they’ll grow stronger together.

I will be continuing the series and pick up the second book in the series, Eldest. I am curious to know more about their adventures. If you haven’t read Eragon yet and love fantasy, I warmly recommend it. It made me forget I was a book reviewer for a long time. I was so captivated by the story I forgot to take notes and had to re-read some parts of the book later. Could not recommend it more! show less

I received this as a birthday present when I was very young, and a while later fell in love with it. Was excited for and saw the film with my mother (then nearly walked out halfway through it, but that didn't deter my love for the source material). I fell out of love with the series by the time book 3 came out, but still pushed through book 4 for completion's sake. Decided to reread these, given Paolini's recent (and planned future) releases, especially since I never reread them after book 3 came out and people my age, for some reason, tell me they "still" hold up.

In short, no, book 1 at least does not. I mean I love my fair bit of garbage, but no.

There are insufficient words for how excruciatingly terrible this book is. I know lots of show more us look back at this with nostalgia, and probably haven't re-read it in 15 or more years, which does color perception, and perhaps the rest of us just really love anything with dragons (particularly blue ones) and rangers and magic, but good grief. Much of this book is repetition and a sense of… heaviness. Too much to say what is honestly not much at all.

Mixing metaphors, wordiness, overuse of random and completely unnecessary similes (“Before him lay Palancar Valley, exposed like an unrolled map.” Yes, it's weird how looking at a landscape from a distance is like staring at a map... wonder why that is), bizarre images, and weirdly specific and placed details: “her deep eyes shone with a driving force. Her clothes were unadorned, yet her beauty was undiminished.” What driving force? Her clothing is unadorned with what? Jewelry? Embroidery? Yes, people who don’t wear those things can look good. Shocking, I know. The story is full of that. It’s honestly tiring. A single half-decent editor could have neatened up most of this, but I guess Paolini's parents didn't want to crush his spirits by putting him through that when they owned the company selling the novel.

Quite frankly, a lot of these sentences don’t even make sense. How is smoke from a chimney “defiant” of a forest? It stands out among trees, I guess, but is the idea “oh it’s shocking that there can be a fire in a forest without setting the forest on fire” or some vague and unnecessary remark about human civilization within a forest? “Few traveled here except merchants and trappers.” Yes??? Who else would travel there??? It’s a village out in some random valley, not Disneyworld???

I suppose Paolini somehow accomplishes communicating the idea of what you’re supposed to be staring at if you’re familiar with fantasy or have seen some version of “The Lord of the Rings”, so you can gloss over just how hard every. single. sentence. is. to. read. I could quote every single sentence in this book. It is a physically painful read that would make you go cross-eyed. It's literally giving me a headache.

Eragon himself is the worst character in the story. He's not compelling. He's not fun. He's not compassionate. He's not funny. He's not smart, which wouldn't be a problem as a character who's meant to be coming into this from a lack of knowledge and then to learn things; he's randomly extremely "intelligent" without a backstory to justify it, and then stupid again for bizarre reasons. His arrogance isn't interesting to watch, because he's only ever rewarded, never taught how he's wrong. At one point he discovers slavery, is angry about it existing, and his solution is to hope a pickpocket tries to steal from him so he can beat the person up. Despite his rage at even the thought of slavers, at one point when he and Murtagh are fighting them, Eragon thinks "if they run, I'll let them go", and when Murtagh kills one, Eragon is enraged about it. To the point that from that point he doesn't trust Murtagh, considers him merciless, and says that Murtagh has to atone for killing a slaver who was planning to kidnap and sell them all. The second worst character in the story is Saphira, whose main issue is being omnipotent (kind of), and then also equally arrogant, a deux ex machina who doesn't do useful things, and also pretty stupid, which is fine, since she's young and meant to learn, but she doesn't really learn? She's just arrogant about it, insulting to Eragon (which wouldn't really encourage him to get better?) and just generally mean. But her territoriality over Eragon is kind of funny to watch, so there's that, I guess? It doesn't help that the weird way Paolini sometimes has the characters talk is always worse with her.

The rest of the cast isn't terrible, they're just varying degrees of stupid by and large. Arya is the smartest one, followed by Murtagh, then Brom. Brom/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Gandalf is just weirdly closed-off for no good reason, randomly gets drunk with a 15-year-old, and is really rude to his friend's wife because she has the audacity to be annoyed at freeloaders in her own house. Murtagh is the best character in the story, honestly, and far too nice to Eragon. But their friendship is kind of cute - despite Eragon being manipulative and awful, generally - so whatever. It's the one bright spot in the story, I guess.

The magic system is stolen from "The Earthsea Cycle". Most of the plot is stolen from "Star Wars: Episode IV" and "The Lord of the Rings". A good chunk of Elvish lore is also from LOTR, and a good chunk of dragon lore is from a mix of "The Earthsea Cycle" and apparently "Dragonriders of Pern". Paolini does nothing good with any of this. He just mashes it together with some of the worst writing I've seen, and rides high off of coming out the same year the "The Two Towers", "Chamber of Secrets", and "Star Wars: Episode II" films did.

If you take away everything that is bad about this: the writing, the characterization, the pacing, and even much of the plot, what you get is basically "dragon ranger fight bad dude", and you can see that 10,000x elsewhere. It's not worth the slog of this series. Yes, he was young and it was his first novel. But quite frankly there are authors older or around his age who write on similar topics who can actually write and write phenomenally who will never get even an ounce of the attention this incredibly garbage bookstopper gets for being lucky enough to be written by the child of folks who own a publishing company.

Quite frankly, if you can find it, Eragon Sporkings did a better job of pointing out many of the problems in this series bit by bit than I ever could. I don't have the strength to go that far. Do not read this. Do not recommend it to your children. Do not buy it for anyone. If you want YA fantasy about dragons, magic, and adventures, read Patricia Wrede's "The Enchanted Forest Chronicles". If you want adult fantasy for the same, read Steven Brust's "Vlad Taltos" books (technically they're not dragons, but they're dragon-like creatures). If you want queer magic fantasy with dragons, read TJ Klune's "The Lightning-Struck Heart" or ND Stevenson's "Nimona". If you want animated dragons, watch "Spirited Away" or "Yona of the Dawn". Or just read anything he stole ideas from, like "The Earthsea Cycle". And if you don't want my advice, just google "YA dragons" and I'm sure there are TONS of modern YA stories featuring dragons that are far, far better than this, and even more that just deal with magic. show less

I did not read this because I thought I would like it. I read it because I wanted something high-fantasy, something with dragons, and I was in a bad mood when I was looking for a book so I didn't want something good, I wanted something I could hate. And it did deliver, so maybe I should give it an extra star just for that. Or not.

Don't get me wrong, I've been hating this series for years. It was actually reading Eragon hate blogs that I discovered the Temeraire series, one of my faves, so there's another reason to award it an extra star. And now that you know that I am the kind of person who would hate read a book or read hate blogs of stuff I haven't even experienced myself (though I have seen the movie - twice), then you should know show more what to expect from this review and whether or not you should read it.

This book has so many problems, and YES every single one of them can be expained by that fact that the author was 15 when he wrote it, but that DOESN'T mean they are not problems. You don't have to tell me something I already knew, and you're not gonna change my opionon re: publishing young author's. Which is that you shouldn't do it. Honestly, I wasn't a better writer when I was Paolini's age, in fact I might have been worse, but at least I didn't publish my shit and charge people money for it!

Okay, so let's list some things that are bad: the names, the writing, the plot, the characters, the world-building ... okay, so almost everything. The names are either stolen or ridiculous (the mythical dragon Brian!!! Galbatorix the high and mighty!!!) and there is absolutely no sense of a common language for any name. They're just generic fantasy with apostrophes in random places, mixed with completely normal names such as Evan and Fredric. Oooookaaaaaay. The writing is basic and over-dramatic, it either under- or over-describes what's going on, there's no middle ground. Either we get treated to fifty paragraphs on how to make a saddle, or just the word "food" to describe anything the characters eat (at least in the beginning, since you can literally see Paolini evolve as a writer as the book goes on there are more descriptions of food going on). Having too many characters in a scene is apparently tiresome, so there are never more than two or three at a time: to keep this up any extra characters are killed, renderd unconcious or sent away. The world-building could have been good, except that LESS IS MORE. You don't need to include every climate possible in your fictional world, you don't all the standard fantasy races and you don't need to give your characters every magical ability under the sun. You just don't.

But the worst sin, in my humble opinion (kidding, all my opinions are obnoxious as fuck), is that it's fucking boring. Every once in a while we getting treated to something exciting ... and Eragon convientely faints or is otherwise removed from the plot. We spend most of our time following him on a roadtrip or watching him explore all the towns - with the dragon safely off somewhere else, because gods forbid we get to know the one cool thing in the book better. Whenever someone does something cool Eragon isn't there to witness it, so instead the person who did it will come back and tell us how awesome it was. Such exciting things in a book, really. Whenever anything exciting happens it's described in the most boring prose imaginable, so you basically just fall asleep trying to give a shit about it. And so on and so on.

But all that said ........ I'm gonna keep reading. For one reason, and one reason only: I am honestly interested in seeing Paolini's writing develop as the series goes on. He got older and older with each book, and given how much time passed between this and the last in the series, he must have gotten better. Good even? I don't know, but I actually want to find out. Just don't expect me to like it. show less

#When I was just a little boy,
I asked my mother, what shall I read?
Something by [a:Priti|2757005|Priti Singh|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-4df4c878d4149c45fac159e88cb784ad.jpg]?
Something by [a:Rich|29947|Adrienne Rich|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1198772292p2/29947.jpg]?
Here's what she said to me.

Que será, será,
Whatever you'll read, you'll read.
Your habits aren't down to me,
Que será, será.#

I was ten and obsessed with dragons. The highlight of most months was going to the library in the next village with my mum and sister. There I would take out far more books than I ever got through before the next visit. Oddly, I almost never renewed my library books, so if I was only halfway through a book when the show more next month came along then tough luck, little Lee. One month during the height of my dragon obsession I took out a real tome, my first seriously big book. I don't remember what it was called, or anything much about it at all, except it involved a young man discovering a dragon and going on a journey both geographic and personal. I adored it enough to renew it the next month and for a long time it was my Favourite Book of All Time.

Eragon is not that book. I mean obviously it's not, When I was ten Christopher Paolini was… oh, wait, he was probably half way through a first draft of Eragon. It'd be easy to blame Paolini's youth and the Rebecca Black-esque manner of Eragon's publication for the myriad faults in the novel. So what the hell, I'll do just that. Damn you, Christopher Paolini's youth! The myriad faults in the novel are all your fault!

Phew. That was quite cathartic. I would add that Eragon isn't the worst mash-up of Star Wars: A New Hope and pretty much every fantasy novel ever, but let's be honest, how many of those have you read? You know an author is sticking a tad too closely to his inspirations when you can accurately predict most of a book's major plot points by thinking back to the adventure of R2-D2 et al. The writing falls into many of the typical problems we all have writing novels at fifteen: purple prose, Gary Stu falling for Mary Sue, too much telling, not enough showing, and more besides.

It's not utterly without the bounds of reason that I'll finish the series some day, although I'd probably have to see all three other books in my local charity shop's three-for-a-pound bargain bucket to be tempted to pick them up. It doesn't help that the cringeworthy attempts at foreshadowing mean I feel like I already know half the plot of what's left. Still, there are probably worse ways to spend a rainy few days and/or the Zombiepocalypse. Now, if you give me a few days, I can probably think of them. show less

I am not big on epic fantasy like this. It's usually very hard for me to world build in my head and imagine the setting and everything. It's not a problem I usually have with anything else, but for some reason epic fantasy does that to me. This book, however, didn't do that to me. I actually really REALLY enjoyed this!

This was my first time reading Eragon. When this book was really huge and blowing up all over the book world, I was reading my adult contemporary and just had no time for silly YA nonsense. Now that all I read is silly YA nonsense, I figured it was time to give this a try. I'm really glad I did to be honest. This was a fresh and unique world, a unique storyline and really interesting. I did watch the movie in theaters and show more really liked it, clearly I don't now. The movie is horrible. I've never seen a worse book to movie in my entire life, it was infuriating.

Eragon was such a good character. I loved him. He was the exact way a 15 year old should be portrayed. Selfish and silly and dumb, and yet he is mature in the right moments and takes on his responsibility because he has to. As well, his reactions to things are fitting. His reaction to his uncle dying was exactly how it should have been, his reaction to his cousin moving/leaving was perfect and his reaction when Braum died was again very appropriate. It is clear that the author knows how to write male characters realistically and I am a huge fan of this since I often find issues with the way characters are portrayed realistically.

Reading his interactions with Saphira (forgive me for spelling, I listened to this book) were my favourite parts. His insecurities were something he wasn't afraid to voice to her. Her voice in the audiobook made me have issues with her, but if I'm being honest I am not her biggest fan. I appreciate her but I don't love her. I just love their relationship and dynamic.

The very very minor romance plot in this story don't fit for me. I'm sure it gets developed and explored much more later on but right now I just don't think it's appropriate.

Overall though, I really enjoyed this. It was something new and creative that I have never experienced before and it's really a nice breath of fresh air!

Book Challenge book #15 - A Popular Author's First Book show less

Looking back, I find myself thinking of this book in two distinct halves: one that had me rueing the day I ever met the friend that recommended the series to me and one that had me wanting to have her come and live with me.

In the year that we worked together, we shared books constantly and prattled on and on about them. One series that had her practically kicking the poor Waterstones staff was this one, mainly because of how long it seemed to be taking for the release of the fourth (and final) instalment. Back then, I wouldn't start the series because I was still honouring my ban on not starting fantasy series until they were completed and so I ignored her pleas and didn't pick this up.

Having read it, I'm both surprised and not that show more she ever made it through this story (not being known for her patience...). The start of the story is promising, with Eragon finding the dragon egg and realising how much danger that puts him and his family in, characters not quite being what they seem and some mortal peril and dragon-related shenanigans. I whipped through the first 100 or so pages grateful, as ever, for the recommendation.

And then began the walking.

When I was younger, I struggled with Lord of the Rings because of the amount of time spent walking between places. My experience was much the same with Eragon. I loved the parts where Eragon and Brom were in towns, encountering ambushes or learning more about Saphira. I found the parts where Eragon and Brom were wandering around and where Brom was dumping information on Eragon and, consequently, me quite tedious. For me, the writing wasn't quite strong enough to sustain the lack of action and the descriptions and dialogue were a little bit lacking.

The legends and history surrounding dragons and their Riders is great background for a series but it was introduced rather heavily by Brom at various points while he is in lecture mode. Despite not relishing the delivery, the substance did suggest that there are great things to come in the remainder of the series. I hope, in a way, that I've got the learning part of the series out of the way and that the remainder of the books are snappier and develop more naturally.

It took me six hours worth of travelling by train to break through the more sedate half of the story into one that had me hooked. It was almost as though Paolini thought I was now adequately briefed in the finer points of history and magic and that it was time to move on and shake things up with some fighting. There was a noticeable shift in pace and I finally started to really enjoy the book. There are elves, magic, cryptic advice from a werecat, a mysterious fortune-telling witch, a city underground and huge roving bands of freaky orc-type baddies. Plus a huge great battle for a finale, which again reminded me of Lord of the Rings, this time favourably, though.

Eragon himself is a tolerable lead but can be a touch self-pitying from time to time. Although maybe being on a quest to avenge your dead family will do that to a person...His relationship with Saphira is endearing but on the sickly-sweet side at times. For a person who is extremely (maybe even overly sensitive), I am very much not an animal person. Something about the human-dragon bond was lost on me, I think, but I did enjoy Saphira's stubbornness and loyalty. She is a kick-a*s female, dragon or not!

Overall: I'd recommend this to more patient readers at the older end of the YA spectrum. There's a lot of waiting around (or, more accurately, walking around) and the story takes quite a while to get going. I will probably read the next in the series (Eldest) but I'm not in any great rush and will only stretch to borrowing it from my local library. That is, unless someone can promise me that the next one is more action, less trekking...? show less