Throwback Thursday: Inheritance Cycle

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The complete set of Inheritance Cycle books, courtesy of paolini.net.[/caption]

By now, I’ve reminisced about quite a few of my favorite series from the past. Most recently, I looked back at my time with J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In the time between those beloved release dates, I would preoccupy myself with reading both Stephen King’s voluminous and various works and another, shorter set of novels known as The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini.

The Inheritance Cycle, which you may know as the Eragon series, enraptured my young adult mind. By that time in my education, I had already exhausted a large number of my go-to books and authors to appease our school’s Accelerated Reader (AR) system. I had read all of the Harry Potter books and had devoured most of Stephen King’s work that existed within the AR system.

In a bit of a panic as to what I should turn to for reading, I asked my English teacher what she recommended. Without skipping a beat, she walked me over to our classroom’s small personal library and showed me a book called Eragon. She told me that the book would be right up my reading alley. I’ll admit that I was a bit dubious at first. Eragon had only just released that year, and I really had no idea what to expect. In the end, my trust of my teacher’s intuition (coupled with the large dragon staring at me from the cover of the book) convinced me to give the novel a fair shot.

At first, the reading posed a bit of a challenge to me. Christopher Paolini, who began writing the book at the age of fifteen, had crafted an intensely intricate world. The very first pages of the book contained a map of the story world known as Alagaësia. The world itself felt imposing enough, of course, but I was soon to discover that Paolini had even created a separate, original language to integrate within his story. The last thirty or so pages at the end of the book were reserved for a dictionary to define all of the various words!

Soon, I found myself awaiting each new release of Paolini’s books just as eagerly as I awaited the next Rowling or King story. I still remember visiting the book’s website, watching as the countdown clock ticked away between the projected release of the next book. My friend and I would sit in study hall at the computer, playing the simple games the website offered, but always checking back for that countdown clock.

Although a complex intensity certainly existed between the covers of Eragon, it proved to be a wonderful experience. The first three books, Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr, wrapped me completely within their universe, new language or not, and although I did not personally enjoy the fourth and final book, Inheritance, as greatly as the others, the journey through its pages was no less entertaining.

In the end, The Inheritance Cycle became one of the core series that brightened my childhood. King, Rowling, and Paolini filled my imagination with countless new worlds to explore. They showed me that the only limit that exists within our imaginations is imagined by us.