My life in books

And this is at least in part why i'm reading boy genius Christopher Paolini's saga about dragons and elves and dwarves and evil overlords and secret pasts and just about every other well-known and frequently-used trope in the fantasy business. (But no unicorns, at least not yet!)

I read Eragon when it first came out, thanks to my partner's mother, who does not really have a clear sense of what I enjoy reading but on very rare occasions does manage to give me something that I find readable.

I think the main things in the first book that kept me interested were Angela the herbalist, who is one of those fairly standard aburpt, gruff and cryptic pronouncement characters, but it's much more fun when they're women, and Saphira the dragon, becasue not a lot of people write female dragons, especially as main characters.

So I just finished the second book in the series, Eldest.

The loading on of overly-familiar tropes, from the "I am your father, Luke" moment to the "what do you mean, you're the heir to the throne?" moment, continues unabated. But one thing I will say about young master Paolini (I suppose I should let go of that - he's now of an age with many other writers just beginning their careers) is that he doesn't mind surrounding his boy-hero with powerful women and letting them actually do important stuff that sometimes even involves them telling him what to do becasue they know more, or are in positions of power. This is a book that passes the Bechdel Test.

And there's this scene where Saphira gets drunk that is just wonderful, because, how often does somebody write about a drunken dragon?