Recent recommendations to read “The Golden Compass” by Philip Pullman led me to the library and landed me at the gym more that anything else has lately. I started reading while riding a stationary bike and the book was so thrilling that I rode like a maniac while tearing through pages. Could a better review of a book be given?
I grew up with Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter of C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.” I knew of no better books than the Narnia Chronicles and I’m quite certain I’ve read the series many times over. Whenever I’ve started new children’s science fiction books, I hold them to the standards of the Narnia Chronicles and I don’t think many books hold up!
I never got into Harry Potter in large part because I resented people falling over themselves with how new and great they were and not mentioning the obvious predecessors. But I digress.
The first line of “The Golden Compass” grabs you by your gut and pulls you into Lyra’s world. How could it not?! “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of site of the kitchen.” I read it and I needed to know what a daemon was. So I read on. And fell in love. And am struggling because as I sit here writing this, “The Subtle Knife,” the second in the series, sits in my purse just waiting to be read.
