This book gets a lot of stick for ripping off LOTR and with similaraties like Aragorn and Eragon we can totally see why. But do you know what? As big of a LOTR fan I am (okay, I'm more into the movies) I don't really have much of a problem with it. Of course there's going to be similarities, Tolkein achieved so much, who wouldn't want to work with his material. 
 I thought Eragon was equally weighted between good and bad. 
 Good: A lot of time was clearly spent mashing out the details. World building in this book is so thorough... maybe too thorough... 
 Bad: This could also be a good thing, but there is a lot of description in this book. While often it is done beautifully and very in depth, I dare anyone to read this and not get bored by the pages of straight description. I'm not dumb, but a lot of it was also frickin' hard to understand. Some paragraphs felt like a thesaurus had been vomitted on to a blue print of a rocket--really technical and wordy. 
 Good: There were a lot of characters, but not too many. A lot of the time with stories with a big cast, it's easy to get swamped by names and eventually resign yourself to not giving a crap about who's who, but that didn't happen here because for the most part they were dinstinct enough to be memorable. 
 Bad: The narrative. To clarify, the last half of the book this wasn't an issue for me, not sure if I just stopped caring or it got better... But either way the first half had me doing some serious eyebrow raising at my kindle. The third person narrative was all praisy about Eragon even though he was so annoying and everything seemed set up to make him out so be some awesome genius but it all seemed so false. 
 Another thing that concerned me was the way the author tried to naturally move the plot along which ended up sinking more dramatically than the titanic- and that had a freakin' theme song. For example: What if I tried to scry something I created with my imagination or saw in a dream? He smiled. Perhaps I'd be shown what my own conciousness looks like. 
 Now I can't talk for everybody, but who, after learning how to scry, would make the logical jump to scry their dreams? Put your hands up now. Oh, nobody? Thought so. This was just a really cheap way to move on to the next part of the plot and sorry but I just didn't buy it. In fact I want a refund for looking at it. 
 This also leads me to another problem with the narrative. I get why it's nice to have occasional first person lines in a third person book, but it was so jarring with Eragon. I felt like it didn't need to be done. 
 All in all though, the book got progressively better and I was glad to have re-read it. This was a rant and i'm pretty sure it reached 'ramble' proportions. Lol soz.