Eragon by Christopher Paolini

I bought this book for a slew of good and bad reasons.

I was at my son’s Scholastic book fair, and we had a pile of books, way more than we should be buying because I have a really, really hard time saying no when it comes to books because they’re books and saying no is like telling them not to do homework and at that point the booklust hit critical mass and I needed to get something for myself and I was idly looking around when this cool looking hardback with a neat looking dragon drawing was there, displayed prominently like it was a big deal and it was either that or Super Diaper Baby or Twilight or something equally bad.

But the hardback, Inheritance, is apparently the last of a trilogy, so I grabbed the first one which was an attractive blue and had just a cool of a picture of a dragon.

And it was okay.  I can’t think of a fantasy series I really liked… the Myth and Discworld series are fun, but they’re not serious fantasy.  There was an interesting series I can’t recall right now that was a bunch of authors all contributing intermingled stories… [pause for Amazon search]… oh, yeah… Robert Lynn Aspirin’s Thieves’ World.  I liked those okay.

What I did enjoy was a well defined description of how magic worked in this world that provided good, “believable” limitations, which help in keeping the story interesting.  Even the much lauded Harry Potter series was deficient in this respect.  You often end up thinking “Why didn’t he just [insert magic thing here]?”

Even more remarkable is that it was written by a 15 year old who self-published at first, and then got picked up by a large publisher and sold a whole lotta’ books.  So… inspirational.