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His Dark Materials
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I really hope someone out there gets the right directing crew together to produce The Golden Compass or Northern Lights as a film. I think that the movie would work very well based on the script – but, there’s a certain difficult moodiness to Pullman’s book that I think would be very hard to capture on the screen.
The cartoonishness of Harry Potter (boy wizard full of derring-do) is what made it easily translated to a film- but Lyra Bellaqua is neither inherently likable nor is she someone we empathize with nor is she someone we admire from the get-go.
Oddly, the thing that makes Pullman’s characters so interesting, their daemon familiars, actually serves to alienate them from us all the more.
Why am I writing about a book I finished weeks ago? Not sure. In either case it’s a good sign that it was a good book.
To say nothing of that collective title to the three books of the series: “His Dark Materials”. I don’t know who he is (Lord Asriel, maybe? But he didn’t want the alethiometer..) and I don’t know what the materials are.
It just has this whole Umberto Eco ring of coolness to it.