Eldest, denied

I started Christopher Paolini's Eldest this weekend. I tried. I really tried. I was impressed by Paolini's debut novel Eragon but I suspect so much of the reason for that is because he started writing the book when he was only 15 and it was published when he was 19. It was a little amateurish, but it's by a fifteen year old and with that in mind it was a promising debut.


You get slack for your first book when you write it as a teenager. People will be impressed. But if you're writing a trilogy, the second book better deliver. Maybe it does. I'll never know. I made it 60 pages in and I couldn't read it anymore. It was no better than what I remember from the first book, very childish fantasy with a little bit too much description of things that don't need to be described. It feels like Paolini is still feeling his way.

I'm not willing to invest my time on this anymore. Maybe the last two hundred pages (of 600) were killer and would stand up with the great fantasy literature of our day. But I doubt it and while I know that a reader should often give a book more than 60 pages of chance I lost all interest in the book.

Maybe when Paolini finishes this series and starts on his next one I'll give it another try because he'll be older and will have had a chance to hone his craft. There are so many good books that I want to read that I don't want to spend too much time on the bad ones.