I had originally planned to read The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell for book number thirty-eight, a book that had come to me along with a dozen or so others in a package from my father (whose taste in historical fiction is quite good; he steered me towards Patrick O’Brian, after all), and I had even announced that fact on this blog, but I got a hundred pages in only to learn that it was the second book in a series, and that while I had been sent the third book, I had not been sent the first. I am not the sort of person who will read a series out of order, so I switched to The Golden Compass instead, and here we are. For those not in the know (although how could you not be, given that it was recently adapted into a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig—a fact the enormous gold sticker on the cover demands I recognize), this is the first book in a trilogy known as His Dark Materials, a title appropriately lifted from Paradise Lost. The trilogy has a reputation for being anti-religous, or at least anti-Christian, and I can certainly see that in The Golden Compass, where the enemy is the well-meaning but cruel and authoritarian Church.
It’s marketed as a children’s book, but I prefer to think of it as an adventure story, because while it certainly feels like children are the target audience, there is a tremendous amount of bloody and violent death and a good deal of language—mostly in the form of scientific terminology, although not always—that would probably be over the heads of most junior-high aged kids, and probably would have been over my head when I was that age (I had an unusually high vocabulary at that age, though I seem to have let it plateau). It is rollicking good fun, though, and seems to have an intellectual depth that’s not present in either the Harry Potter or Narnia books. I would have loved them at that age, and I’m enjoying them now.
Next is The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman.
