Northern Lights

Penny (Elaine) 's been recommending His Dark Materials for the longest time, so I picked it up for the plane ride to/from Jakarta last week. And with the author's recent interviews indicating that he liked CS Lewis' Narnia works but thought that Tolkien's LotR had no substance, it seemed he might have something there in his own work.

It was.... not as good as it could have been. A very interesting backstory, with the daemons, fate, some quantum weirdness. But done in too cavalier a manner, the story's too short, everything falls into place too easily. Unless his whole theme is meant to be that Lyra is the fated one and that everyone else she meets is just cannon fodder in the story of her life, and the book is meant to feel like that. That's like HP telling me that Eddings' repetitious writing style in his Belgariad and Malloreon series is meant to fill in the theme of recurring patterns of history.

I definitely won't be buying the next two books, I think. Maybe borrow from library just to see the completion of his ideas.

And contrary to what Wing thinks, without having read the last two books, I do think Asriel and Coulter are both evil people.