Monthly Archives: July 2026

So I’ve been working through the modern fantasy canon, mostly by hitting up used book sales and buying armfuls of mass market paperbacks. My shelf’s now overloaded mostly with well-loved copies of the Dragonriders of Pern, ASOIAF, and Shannara, which means I need to start digesting the collection I spent tens of dollars on.

Eragon was one of those books I picked up from a book sale, opting to give it a crack since I can fill a big bag of books and pay $10 of the whole thing, so it was basically free. I knew the gist: the archetypal “boy finds a dragon egg” story, a teenager’s debut novel published by his parents’ publishing company. It had a (in my opinion ugly, horse-looking) dragon on the cover. As dcb astutely pointed out, “Eragon” is one letter off from “dragon.” Huh.

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