The Book of Dust

I...don't know. I might come back and give more points later. But His Dark Materials together are probably the most formative books in my life, and the bar might just be too high. Golden Compass was Just Another Fantasy novel when I read it, about the same time that Subtle Knife came out. But the six months between reading Golden Compass and Subtle Knife were very formative in my life (it was the transition from middle to high school) and so in many ways, reading Subtle Knife is deeply and fundamentally associated with starting to see symbolism in books, starting to ask existential questions about myself. Amber Spyglass was published just after my freshman year of college, and I read it multiple times back-to-back that summer, pondering the purposes of existence. Two years later, I saw each half of the stage production multiple times in the London National Theatre, and did the backstage tour twice. I have signatures of all of the actors. The altheiometer inset is framed on my wall, and it's not a coincidence that my avatar here is an altheiometer. HDM really formed who I am, how I interact with the world and how I read.

La Belle Sauvage, for now, at least, is Just Another Fantasy Novel. I have some specific concerns: the female characters have basically no agency (a major disappointment, after Lyra); the antediluvian portion of the novel really drags, with a few Whizbang!Fantasy moments but no real depth and the opportunity to use Daemons and worldbuilding to make the villain hair-raisingly creepy instead of just lazily using rape to signal moral corruption was passed over. But honestly, I could overlook all of those. My biggest disappointment was that there just wasn't much there there. I don't know if it's me – that I'm older and less malleable by a book – whether this book really is shallow, or whether it's set-building and the best is yet to come...