BUT, I’m officially giving up on two books I’ve been trying to get through pretty much the entire summer: Bone: The One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith and Eragon by Christopher Paolini. Both of these books are highly thought of, both are of the fantasy genre, and both are surprizingly boring.

I remember reading the first few Bone comic books when they first came out, then just sort of losing track of the story after a while, so when this enormous (~11oo pages) complete volume was released, I was thinking that this would be one of those comics series that would really come together as a complete work in a way that the episodic comics didn’t. Unfortunately my impressions this time around were pretty much the same as I remember from when I first read the comics: the initial few hundred pages that make up the section called “The Great Cow Race” are absolutely great—the tone of the story is wonderful (I mean that in the litteral sense, as in “filled with wonder”), the characters are interesting and the narative is suspenseful and fun. Immeditely after the cow race, the entire tone of the book changes into a stunningly predictable fantasy story that seems to go on and on and on and on….

Speaking of predictable fantasy stories, I also give up on Eragon. This fantasy novel (prose not comics) was a runaway best seller and I figured I’d check it out and see what all the hoopla was all about. After about 100 pages I was still waiting for something to happen that doesn’t happen in every single fantasy book and movie ever made…but no dice; it’s just pretty much standard stuff. Boy finds dragon, evil people kill boy’s family, quest for revenge/coming of age story, lots of goofy names for things with extraneous commas (like Za’chra-lar, and whatnot).

Maybe I’m just not a fantasy person. I’ve read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings pretty much every few years since I’ve been able to read, but other than that, I haven’t found much to like.