Book of the Week #5: Inheritance

We've passed the one month mark now, and I haven't missed a week yet! It's so exciting!

I've read the Eragon books (the inheritance cycle), by Christopher Paolini, before, when they first came out. I had scuttled through them in my early teens, and as a whole, mildly enjoyed them. They weren’t really works of art, but I liked them enough to read them, and to have some anticipation when the next one came out. I even met the author, and he signed my book. Then I stopped. This may have something to do with the complete flop that was the film adaptation, or the fact that I had seemingly outgrown the genre, or perhaps the fact that 3 years between sequels is too long to wait. No matter what, I wasn’t even aware that the fourth (and final) book had been out since last November, so when I stumbled upon this knowledge, I decided that it was time to give it a read.

The first thing that I liked about the book was that gives a tidy little summary of the first three books right at the beginning, so you can remember some of the finer points that you may have missed. I think that this is really interesting because it lets you know what Paolini found important when summarizing the books. It then jumps right into the story. Eragon, the dragon rider, on his dragon Saphira, are trying to kill the generic bad king dragon rider Galbatorix. Along the way, Eragon has to deal with his brother, the girl that he likes, and the royalty of other nations, while simultaneously murdering all the bad guys to bring peace.

I wanted to like this book. I really, truly, wanted to like it. But I didn’t. For starters, it’s overly long. My eBook version was 894 pages long. Not to sound terribly shallow, but a book needs to be really, really good for me to spend that kind of effort on it. The book ends quite abruptly as well, making the end not really seem like the end. This isn’t particularly appealing. Additionally, the book is very drab. The characters were flat, kind of one dimensional. The scenes are slow and slow and plodding, and jerk around from one storyline to the next in a very unpleasant fashion.

It was nice that I finally got the conclusion I had been waiting for since 2005, but it wasn’t a great book. I’d give it a 3/10. You don’t need to read it.