Books this year: a book diary

I tried to read something else; 62 by Cortazar. Something experimental, something adult. But the pull was too great, and I gave in. I had to finish, had to find out what happened. To the little kids in the fantasy novel. SHUT UP IT’S GOOD.

The Amber Spyglass wraps up the His Dark Materials trilogy. Trying to separate the books makes for a bit of a quandary, especially when read back-to-back, as they form a cohesive piece. But The Amber Spyglass is definitely a worthy ending to the trilogy.

I will not explore the grievances I might have had with Pullman’s humanistic evangelical approach as I originally planned. Laying out my concerns to my roommate, she stated that she was unaware of the background of the novel, and thus didn’t notice when she should have taken offense. This seems like the most desirable position. If you have a novel for kids where God is getting killed, the lines are probably already drawn on whether you can enjoy it or not, regardless of what the author’s intent was.

The book follows two children as they attempt to bring about a second fall. Introduced are new characters and worlds and creatures, and the book is by far the most imaginative of the three in terms of content. The protagonists go to a world with miniature spies with poison-tipped spurs who travel on dragon flies, to the land of the dead, and to the home that the Authority (God) lives in.

What’s amazing is that Pullman dispenses with much of the religious overtones with over a hundred pages to go, and shows that the story is largely about love. Not love in a bullshit humanistic-hold-hands-fellow-men kind of way, but love in the sense that we all, if we are lucky, have experienced it growing up: the feeling that you aren’t a kid anymore, because you love. And it’s weird, and it’s sexual, and it’s confusing, and you know you’re still a kid, but you don’t want to be, and you figure out that this is the color of life that you have been missing. Pullman manages to capture this almost pitch-perfectly. And there are still little midget dudes running around with spurs on dragonflies.

I can see this book changing a kid’s life, probably for the better. And I can see it being helpful to occasionally be reminded of the wonder of logic and love as an adult.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 5:58 am and is filed under Books Ike has read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.