(10/28/2006)
My dears, some of you, who have rated this beer bogie pretending to be a so called 'book' (and we're not being jealous or intentionally insulting or just saying this because of lack of knowledge about books) with any grade above 'poor' have probably never heard of things like 'literature' or 'creative' writing', not even to mention 'aesthetics' or 'good taste'.
The basic idea and everything connected to it is disgracefully stolen from Tolkien, for instance - the elves and their culture, is not only copied, but is also a great insult with its simplifying and changing some details just to make it look like it's different. Plus, you might have noticed that there is a book called The Lord of the Rings, in which you will find a certain mine called Moria, very similar to the one described in Eragon. The whole structure, which is based on the story of a boy who just lived and then he encountered something priceless and went on a long lasting journey, full of fun adventures, is a copy of the Hobbit, the idea of him being special, a savior of the world and connected to some sort of prophecy, implies to stealing basic ideas from Harry Potter. So, to sum it up, Paolini has no possible future as a writer, he obviously got published mainly because of his parents who by the way OWN a publishing company and because of his young age. This should not be a reason to tolerate bad books. It's not fair to younger readers that they are manipulated to read books just because of the publicity and because they're not old enough to read the fantasy classics. It is known that Paolini got famous by presenting his book in many elementary schools.
We should raise the level of reading with interesting, yet quality books, not with low-quality books that just sum up all that has been written in the fantasy genre so far.