surprise, with bonus Malkovich!

DS1 is reading Eragon, the first volume of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Trilogy. Overall, I found it to be a slightly derivative, somewhat tedious work, with much improvement in the second volume, Eldest.

As he reads each day, we discuss what happened in the book. I am doing my best not to give anything away, and he is having a very good time. This book is at the perfect level to challenge and engage him without being so complicated as to lose him along the way. (That same simplicity is what made it a little tedious for me. That's OK, though.)

DD has to get into this act somehow, so she will often participate in the conversations, or try to -- it is next to impossible because she hasn't, of course, read any of it. But she does know some basic plot points, mainly that the boy Eragon found a dragon's egg, and it hatched into the blue dragon, Saphira. And she has seen the red dragon on the cover of Eldest, too. She has asked me a million questions, too: when is the next book coming out? what is it called? what color would it be?

I don't know, let's look it up on the web, I replied, and so we did. We discovered that book 3, perhaps called Empire but no one knows for sure, may be released in the summer of 2007, and it will feature a green dragon. DD had guessed green, and I agreed it made sense: sapphire, ruby, emerald. The set will look quite lovely on the book shelf!

But that's not all we discovered: there is a movie in production (probably post-production, come to think of it) right now; Eragon the movie will be released this December! The original notice we saw said it was to be released in June, and I was completely gobsmacked by that, since I stay on top of new releases even though I rarely go to the movies. I had just read the "summer movie preview" in the paper last week! How could I have missed Eragon? Well, it turns out I didn't, and release has been pushed back to Christmas.

I admit, I'm psyched for this movie. The cast looks fantastic, with Jeremy Irons as Brom, Eragon's mentor-guide, and John Malkovich as Galbatorix, the insane king. You can see many other photos here. This could be just the ticket for sustaining us through a long, Harry Potter-less winter.