His Dark Materials

For many years, I distinguished my reading and viewing habits from those of my sisters with the notion that if something had a dragon on the cover, I wasn’t interested. In my family, it was shorthand to acknowledge that, unlike Shannon and Veronica, I wasn’t interested in wizards, time travel, outer space, or elves and goblins. Then I had to amend my shorthand to something along the lines of, not interested if it’s about dragons...unless it’s Harry Potter. Fast forward a few years, and I count The Time Traveler’s Wife among my favorite books and Battlestar Galactica among the very best TV shows I’ve ever watched. It took a long time, but I finally found enough quality in the fantasy/sci fi genres to help me accept that, like every genre, there is some great material out there along with a bunch of junk, that a good story will always be compelling, and that it’s possible to care about believable characters even if they fight aliens (or cylons). I’m still picky about these genres, and I don’t understand the inclination of fantasy authors to give all their characters really weird names; then again, I don’t understand the Hollywood trend to do the same, and I still read Entertainment Weekly.

All this is by way of introduction to say that I finished the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy last night. I loved all three books: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Author Philip Pullman first introduces to our heroine, Lyra, and her almost-but-not-quite-like-our-world world in the first book. Each of the subsequent books pull out farther and farther until we’re no longer ensconced in Lyra’s world but in story that is truly universal. I loved the characters from Lyra and Will to Lee Scorseby to Iorkek Byrinson to Serrafina Pekkala. I even loved — as characters at least — Mrs. Coulter and her golden monkey.

Pullman can be a bit heavy with the exposition, especially at the beginning of each book, which I can imagine initially turning off some readers. Since the books are officially intended as YA novels, the heavy exposition could be particularly troublesome, but it’s worth pushing through those pages of set up. The books provide a lot of big questions to ruminate on. If you’re just in it for the entertainment, there is plenty of that, too.