Pretty much all of us think the Cycle books are bad, but of all of them which one do you think is the best? In my opinion I think Eragon is the best of the three so far.

Eragon definitely. I get the feeling he wrote it before the purple really started flowing. Sure, the plot is similar to Star Wars and others all of us could name, but honestly, it had the best storyline of all of the books in the cycle so far. And with less filling in-between, it was quite a lot more entertaining, too.

I liked Durza. Therefore, Eragon.

Eragon. Eldest bored me and I had low standards for books in the past.

My answer is also Eragon. You could tell with that one that he really wanted to tell a story, and he wasn’t as aware of the audience as he was in Eldest and Brisingr. He wrote Eragon from the heart, and it showed. That’s what initially attracted me to the book before Eldest came along. And Brisingr in many ways was the nail in the coffin, or the proverbial camel-breaking straw.

Well, I remember thinking they were neat at the time. If I read them now I might wonder what the hell I was thinking. But they seemed original and controversial and all the dwarves were fairly interesting. Even if they did drone on for long periods of time. Maybe I should go look at that again.

I must confess, when I first read Eragon, I actually liked the prose. Back then I wasn’t aware what the rest of society considered good prose as opposed to bad prose.

Eragon was probably the best of the series as a book, but Brisingr had the most improvements. Disregarding the terrible “plot”, stilted “dialogue”, and all-consuming filler, it had a lot more character development and the purple prose was somewhat reduced.

Eragon atomic leg drops the hell out of both sequels IMO. If Paolini had stopped there, or continued in that vein, I probably wouldn’t hold his success against him the way I do. Eragon reads like a dorky teenager wrote it, but a dorky teenager so full of pure and earnest enthusiasm that it’s not to like even if you realize it sucks.

It’s like your little brother made you a terrible drawing out of macaroni and fingerpaint. Hell if you know what it is, but you know the kid put his heart in to it, so you hang it on the fridge. Granted, given it’s Eragon we are talking about, it might be more feasible to hang the fridge on it, but the point remains the same.

With Eldest/Brisingr, it’s like your little brother made you an even worse drawing but tried to make it highbrow and incorporate artsy elements to it, and then gives it to you and expects you to view it as something really impressive and mature. Yeah, the original drawing was probably just as balls, but adding such absurd levels of pretension in the followups just smothered the only redeeming quality the first one had.

Everyone seems to say that while Eragon is pretty bad by literacy standards, it was enjoyable enough. Well I didn't like it at all. I couldn't finish it because I was so bored with the desert part, but I did get to the Dwarf city. The events just didn't seem that imaginative and it was stretched out way too long. And I found some things really lame like the fortune teller bluntly telling Eragon everything important that's going to happen in the rest of the story thus ruining a lot of surprises, the were-cat I thought was a stupid idea, and Garrow giving Eragon that big list of generic advice.

So I didn't bother reading the next two books, but I have read all of the sporkings on http://eragon-sporkings.wikispaces.com/ to get a pretty detailed gist of what happens in them. Though the person doing them takes ages to release more chapter sporkings :(

But yeah Eragon probably would be the best out of them like everyone says.

I liked Eragon more than I liked Eldest (I rarely like sequels better), but I thought Elva was the only original character in the series, and so I like Eldest. I remember reading Eldest and thinking that he wrote it like a school book report, trying to get in as many big words as possible and never letting them repeat. I later found out this was called “thesaurus rape”. But I thought that even when I liked Inheritance, so… Eragon is better.

I’d like to take the oppurtunity to reiterate that Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is awesome.
And probably makes more sense if you’re not reading the third one first (because of the awesome cover art) at 9, and skip most of the book to get to the Miriamele bits.