First Thoughts on a Book

So. Eragon. The hardcover is currently in Amazon's top 150 bestsellers. The movie adaptation is coming out a couple weeks into December. I've seen the book on the shelf at Borders pretty consistently over the last couple years. The children of friends are raving about it. Even some adult friends are speaking of it in terms usually reserved for the likes of a young Harold Potter. So. I thought I'd check it out. And after a couple false starts, I'm now about sixty pages in and am certain that I'll finish it in a week or so. And what do I think?

I think it's a great book. For something written by a seventeen-year-old.

No really. After reading about twenty pages with a furrowed brow and wondering how on earth a book with writing this, er, pedantic(?) could 1) get by an editor and 2) get published to acclaim, I made known my hesitations and was told that the author wrote it as a kid. Further inquiry reveals that the book was self-edited. The pieces all began to fall into place.

My impression was that the author was someone who had absolutely fallen in love with the English language yet did not have the kind of experience with it to know when to reign it in. The author practices his craft without reserve, heaping adjective after adjective into sentences. Just when you think a sentence cannot bear with a single other adjective, just when you think another descriptor will burst the gut of the sentence, he proves you wrong, stuffing at least five more in previously unfilled nooks and crannies.

The author revels without moderation. He is simply drunk with adjectives. And with simply awful names for proper nouns. I think he's read too much bad science fiction/fantasy and learnt to accommodate some of the genres' worst tropes. This deserves its own post so I'll hold off for now, but here is a note to all young sci-fi/fantasy authors out there: stop using apostrophes in names. Just stop it, please.

It may be that you've read this and still haven't figured out what I think of the writing of Eragon (by the way: Eragon is pronounced exactly the same as Aragorn but minus the second R). Allow me to clear that up straightaway.

Eragon features some of the worst writing I've read in a published novel. A real editor may have done the book a world of good, but we'll never know because we're stuck with this pile of pages that should never have left the notebooks that originally housed it, should never have been bound into any sort of printed edition, should never have been marketed to the public. I feel bad saying this because I'm certain that the author, Christopher Paolini, put his heart and soul into these books; but I'm also certain that when Mr. Paolini is thirty, he'll be horrified that the thing he is most known for is this awful little bestseller that somebody should have had stopped him from self-editing. Really, rough-draft it up when you're a kid, but hold onto those drafts until you're actually capable of writing with discernment.

Sigh. Only 300 or so more pages to go. My only hope is that the story stops being derivative retread of every other fantasy tale out there.