Last weekend, I went to Barnes & Noble. I left with three purchases:
» "Dirty Minds" -- a multiplayer game in which the clues are dirty but the answers are clean [hilarious, BTW]
» Twilight -- because everyone and their mother has recommended it
» Eragon -- because I've always been interested in the premise and the movie was okay
So I pick up
Eragon the other night, intending to read a few chapters before bed. And it turns out that reading
Eragon causes the same type of pain as reading bad!fic. :| Which is basically what the book is -- bad fanfiction written by a sixteen-year-old nerd, and then edited in a slapdash manner by a man eager to profit on "young genius".
Things I got out of the first three pages [after which I flung the book away from me in horrified disgust]:
» The bad guy is a redhead. I guess this makes a change from Harry Potter, where the good guys were almost all redheads.
» There was an elf, and another elf, and a Mary Sue elf with eyes and hair dark as the night she was riding in.
» The bad guy minions look like men, except they don't at all.
Maybe I'll try to read it to my nephews at some point, but until then I can tell right now that it's gonna be gathering dust on my hasn't-yet-arrived dorm bookshelf/bed rack from Bed Bath and Beyond. The moral of this story: don't do everything you're interested in. It could make your brain hurt.