Category Archives: Books

Eldest Review

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Product Image: Eldest
Eldest
My rating: 5 out of 5

Eldest is the second book in the Inheritance Trilogy. It was released just this past month. We got a box set of this new book along with the first book Eragon.

I read Eragon and couldn’t wait to start on Eldest. I did wait a bit, not long. I finished Eragon and wrote a review here yesterday. I finished Eldest this afternoon.

Eragon was a better book IMO, but it is so only because this is how I traditionally view trilogies, that the first and last are the best, that the middle is a bigger stage-setter for the end. All in all though, this book, Eldest, is full of adventure and growing, fighting and war. Parts of the end are a bit jumbled in my mind. I did race through the book. I couldn’t help it. It was very readable and a delight to read.

I found many parts of it to align themselves to real life situations, how we know someone, then don’t see them, that person changed and grows, and then we see them again. Who are they? Often it is we are are on the receiving end of “who are you?” Eragon goes through this. He changes and it’s fantastical to his cousin, who is going through is own hellish experience and not understanding what’s going on with his cousin, and how the truth comes out … it’s all a shock to Eragon, but not a total shock to the thinking reader. And the changes that Eragon went through as he trained with the Elves are wonderful, but he’s changed so that when he gets to the place of having to be The Rider in war, it’s a bit uncomfortable for him, so many things he’s learned, and grown in mind, body, power … he looks different, and everyone does notice, when he gets to face his foe and then his cousin, it’s them who *to me* make him feel a bit odd about it, like he’s doing weird things. It’s like he’s great about it all, and then others mock him a bit for it, cheapening it.

It’s all about the truth though, the evil in the land of Alagaësia is not those who have magic, for this is a fantasy land, not one which there is a Supreme God in, as of yet. There are religions, but there is no absolute about religion in this fantasy land of Alagaësia, but things about race and religion have come up in Eragon’s learning sessions, and what he’s faced more and more in how this book culminates.

It will be interesting to see how the story goes in the last book. (But must wait, so very long until it’s out in hardback, whenever that will be!)

Eragon Character Quiz

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You are most like SAPHIRA

Like the majestic dragon, Saphira, you are brave and ferocious in battle but also deep in ancient wisdom. You think before flying headfirst into battle. You prefer the solitude of the wilderness to the populated cities of Alagaësia.

WHICH ERAGON CHARACTER ARE YOU MOST LIKE?

The quiz is fairly meaningless if you haven’t read “Eragon”, but you can answer and get a result, of course, like I said, it’s just pretty meaningless if you haven’t read the book. :)

I’m glad to come out as the beautiful blue sparkly dragon Saphira, I like her a lot. :)

Pronunciations:

Eragon – EHR-uh-gahn

Saphira – Suh-FEAR-uh

Alagaësia – al-uh-GAY-zee-uh

Eragon

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Speaking of good books, as in the last post, the Inheritance Trilogy has this site linked … which looks good, and we are very excited about it, even though we’ve not read the books yet, but since I’m writing about it all today, and my wireless keyboard is going nuts, not working right:

I declare the rest of today, Day after Birthday Recovery and Sinking into Egragon through Literary Portal Day.

Cheerio!

[Update: 9:06pm] I got to read the first chapter and a half, and that’s it. I was constantly interupted at first, when I tried to read the book downstairs, and got nowhere, so I went up to my bed with strict instructions for the children to play with this or that particular thing and let me alone for an hour, so I could sink into my reading for once.

Asa just couldn’t leave me alone, so start, read a sentence, stop. Start, go back and read sentence, read a few paragraphs, stop, start, …. stop. I gave up after that and resolve to read as much as I can tonight. I really did like how it started. I had a bit of trouble with the part I was last reading, it was a bit choppy, dare I say I was prejudiced by my knowledge of whom the person is that wrote it, from reading of the author, and knowing he was younger when he wrote the book, or not. I will say it this way “It reminded me of my own writing when a teen, a bit rough, not said in a clever way, not “knowingly”, not “flowing”, just immaturely written. It was just a small section. It made me uncomfortable, like when I hear someone singing and they go flat or sharp or get mousy sounding, and I know better how to sing what they are singing and I am embarrassed for them. Anyhow, I do like how the book is in general though, and a fresh crack at the book later will be one that has already read that small section and maybe it’ll not be that bad second time through, and I don’t expect the rest of the book to be rough as that piece was. Just to be forthcoming, it’s the part where Eragon gets to town and is in the Butcher shop … it’s the dialogue, the character introductions that ensue … it really reminded me of stories that I wrote when I was a teen, my self-attempts at novel writing that I abandoned.

I abandoned them because I decided I hated dialogue … and felt constrained to write about places that are real, like I couldn’t “invent” my own world to write about. I was held in check by my silly education I’d had up until then, and I despise it grotesquely … I’m mad at myself for letting it get the best of me and keep me from writing more.

Dialogue is hard to write, it takes maturity, I think. So it’s something that grows with a writer as they mature and keep on writing. My education derailed so many of my desires. I’ve toyed with creating my own world and attempting to write novelia again. Hmmm. I’ll see about it after awhile. It’s time to enjoy a young author with a good future. The Inheritance Trilogy is the beginning, readingly wise for me, and eventually for my children.

Society of Books

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I posted this quoted material on Carmon’s site

I got a “Spam Karma” warning: two links, and a different email address, no doubt, pegged me for a spammer :veryshocked: :LOL:

What book would you use to escape?

I prefer to curl up with any of the Cordwainer Smith stories … here is a link to an Illustrated Bibliography, on a site run by one of his daughters.

I also love to sink into Little House on the Prairie series at times, but my preference runs to read Farmer Boy time and again. That’s my favorite, Little House in the Big Woods is second. I’ve been reading these (Little House) since I was 8. :)

Then put into a category: Chronicles of Prydain & Lord of the Rings Trilogy — they are pure lovely escape at other times. In this category will be a new entry, the second in the Inheritance Trilogy just came out. I haven’t read the first or second, but know that, from reading ABOUT them, the tradition this writer comes from is bound to be richly portrayed in the pages … Eragon is the first book, Eldest is the second and just came out mid-August. I have them sitting on my desk … just need the time to dig in now.

I love good literature written for children, it’s never outgrown :)

Marysue (Maisy)

July sure went by fast

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I know time goes fast when you are having fun, but what if it goes by fast when you are definitely NOT having fun? :)

Time has flown for me the last few years, and this last month, July 2005, has been quite the fastest, by far, in my estimation of historical events in my life. It’s now officially August. Wow.

August is a month that has historical attachments to it for me. I guess I was ingrained with the “school year” calendar in my younger days, and I view July and August as pure Summer days of freedom, with it all beginning in early June at the latest, if not May.

In my own lifetime and school “career” I saw that idea taken and smacked up and torn apart. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s the idea of freedom from tyranny which I have, it’s a beautiful picture in my head that is connected to the idea of Summer and that is what this part of the year is.

We homeschool, and are not on any sort of schedule as the public school’s have. I felt horrid when I opened up the Ads in the paper around the last weekend in June or first weekend in July and saw all the “Back to School” ads … really I felt bad. I understand that most schools around here start this very week that we are just beginning on the calendar. That just messes with my internal summer clock.

We “officially” begin a new year of homeschooling in September, but that’s only in the eyes of the school board. We do our thing year round, but nothing formal. This coming year I’ll be doing more with our eldest. He’s 9 and reads well, can write, needs more practice there, he has an electrical experiement set that we can get an upgrade for. There are other things in that realm of electrical and computer that we’ll be looking at. He likes Bionicles and is collecting them all. Also into K’nex. The other two children love the K’nex too. They follow directions to build things, and also make things on their own. (I would have loved K’nex when I was a child!)

The two younger are 6 and 4. I’m working slowly to get them reading. That’s all they need, it’s the code to open up learning in any way they want to. If I push them, they won’t get it any faster than they could by doing it slowly. I do it slowly and punch up whatever they seem ready for.

All the children draw and color. Eldest draws intricate scenes: boats, houses, cross-sections with all kinds of things going on. Sometimes people are in the scenes, often robots, bionicle-like things, dinosaurs, etc. He’s not fastidious, but fastly draws things in, and spends time filling in with lots of things. His “coloring” is hurried too, and it’s sloppy.

His younger brother is 4 years younger. His coloring is really good. His drawing is simplistic. He’s opposite of his brother in that way. He’s also an extrovert, whereas his older brother is an introvert.

The middle child is our girl. She’s into drawing faces. She has some neat things she’s done lately, on a regular sheet of paper, plain 8.5×1, she has faces started landscape at the top left edge and uses up a couple of square inches for each face, one after the other, then down a line and continuing.

She’s had an interesting way of drawing people, usually going for frontal format. Her elder brother is the one that does cross-sections, and makes people/things from different angles. She herself does make people from the side, but likes the faces so much I think, she prefers to make them so that their faces can be shown. :)

I’m a doodler, I draw things that flow from my pen. I have never stretched my abilities and done much more. In school I did have “instruction”, in 6th grade more so than not, that I recall best. My teacher there was very strict. She was art and English teacher. My homeroom teacher in 5th grade too. Most people didn’t like her much. She’s one teacher I was sort of afraid of in my lower grades, but when I ended up in her class, I started to see something, and I am thinking of it now, and think she saw something in me that others did not. I think she’s the one who got me to be tested for the gifted program. I didn’t get in, my math stuff was all too low. I felt a softness of lovelyness in that teacher though, when everyone else saw her as hard as nails. Hmm.

So anyhow, I did drawing there in her classes, more formally in 6th grade. She insisted that all English things, like stories and poems, have art included with them. :) You must know that I hadn’t considered her in a long time. She was an older woman (probably only in her 50′s back then ;) ).

I never had considered myself good at replicating actual life. I am able to draw things I see, but I don’t LIKE doing it. I see it too nicely to reproduce it with my poor hand to my own perfections faulting.

So I doodle. I doodle graphical-like. Just shapes of meaning or nonsensical creation. I’ve done a particular type since childhood, mostly then on bookcovers for certain. I still do it today and realized not too long ago it really is like tattoos I’ve seen on people IRL, TV, Print, etc. I’ve not copied it from anything, it’s only natural doodling. Nothing new under the sun, you know. :)

One of my most favorite simplistic graphics is what I have on this site in use as my “gravatar”, which is “globally recognized avatar”, something I’ve enabled for comments on this site … you sign up for a free account on the gravatar site, and upload your avatar, and it’s associated with one email address. So anytime you comment on a site that uses the gravatar service, if you use an email address that is registered with gravatar.com then your avatar will load on that comment. You can see mine on any thread of recent time here I’ve commented on. I don’t always comment with that email address on other sites, so I do have a colored version of that graphic I’ll associate at a later time with my other email I use.

I have graphics from very recent years in books and on a few pages of things, and have scanned a few into the computer, and want to get them all in. I don’t really have many that are that good, but some have potential for working on further, and some are standalone pretty good, IMO. Some I have to take into a graphics program and remove lines behind them, seeing as I do often doodle on lined paper. Something I truly want to get away from doing. I want to take my doodling more seriously. It’s actual an art form that I didn’t consider art. It is art. Bowl me over with a feather when I realized that finally. :)

Along these lines I’ve been encouraging the children to draw what they want to and to be as careful doing it as they can, making it as nice as possible, without pressuring them to make it perfect. There is a book I have, but haven’t really read it. It met with the Green Incident and I need to replace it. The Green Incident is an Asa Event. He found something that I had under the sink and poured it over a bunch of my stuff, back when I had my old laptop in the kitchen, and had just put a new pile of books that I was going to do stuff with, out. A bunch of good books. The stuff he poured was thick green pungent smelling concentrate to kill worms on tomato plants, etc. “BTKiller”. I was not happy, to say the least. So anyhow, that book I referred to is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, or something similar. It’s about learning to really use your right-brain to draw, whether you are left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant. Some of it I gleaned, and it’s what made me realized that I do draw with the right-side of my brain. My designs come from my hand, straight from the right-brain, as I don’t design things I think of, I just let it flow. So my thoughts are that someday I can better myself through drawing if I get that book in good form again, and use it with the children and see what can develop.

I often make things with hearts in them, as my gravatar is. I use gel pens, I have a large set of colors, and many of my designs are full of color, and it’s my choice as to what they look like, but I turn my left-brain off entirely and just do it. If you aren’t “right-brain”-ish, you might’nt know what I mean, it’s just automatic for me, not something I have to turn off. It’s particular of me that my left-brain is able to be turned off and on, but my right brain is always on. My left-brain functioning isn’t 100% useful either, just part of it. Well this is part of the whole thing about my family, we are all VS, that’s Visual Spatial, that’s “right-brain dominant”. So I know that my kind of learning is theirs, and we just “do it”. We learn through many things, and I think that reading and artisticness and nature are the best things to learn via. :)

So Summer is freedom to me. I hate the thought of formal school in August. (It was hard enough to think it right in September back in my youth! The lure of new supplies is what drew me usually.) It’s stifling of breath to me. It’s stifling to think of learning being something to go to school for. I learned in school a bit, but learned much more outside of school. I learned on my own from the start and never stopped. Summer was the best learning time, reading, reading, reading, no interference from school work; and climing trees, running, exploring the hills, and woods and cemetaries and … ah, just really living and learning from everything around. Drinking it in.

That’s the idea I have of freedom in the first place, real freedom, freedom from tyranny. The Summertime ideal is written of in literature, like The Penrdragon series (King Arthur) by Stephen Lawhead.