My two cents on books, part I

If there is one thing my long-ass daily train commute is good for, it's catching up on my lapsed reading. I have an extremely short and superficial attention span (which might explain my career choices in the news business) that doesn't lend itself well to books that aren't riveting to me from the first page--nay---the first word. When I only had time to crack a book during the drowsy moments before bedtime or during red lights in traffic, reading wasn't exactly an attractive pursuit. My imagination and my grip of the English language (and perhaps my saftey on the roads) suffered greatly, to my immense regret.

But, I find that on a train, where there is little else to do than scowl at the self-righteous suburban prick commuters who think their bags merit a seat more than their fellow man, I find my senses focused inward and my attention primed for the written word. Thusly, this is how I came into my fervor for Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.



This science-fiction fantasy masterpiece was recently given a publicity boost upon the release of the bijillion-dollar blockbuster, "The Golden Compass." It's unfortunate that the movie was the impetus for me to read the series, rather than at my young cousin's urging several years before Hollywood took to bastardizing and completely missing the point of that installment of the series.

On the surface, the series is about a young girl's unwitting journey to save the universe. She comes from a world where a person's soul is a conscious and disparate being that walks beside him or her in the form of an animal. Together with the help of her soul (referred to as a daemon), witches, polar bears and a magical substance called "Dust," this little girl discovers that the universe is not just one world, but thousands of parallel worlds that have grown up on top of each other, and that to save them all means growing up herself. Throughout the stories, she faces fears that leap off the pages into the reader's reality.

Looking deeper in to the story, one can see that it is a powerful criticism of the Catholic Church and its influence on society. It is blatant and unrelenting toward the climax of the series, much to the dismay of its heaviest critics--including the Church. But Pullman's intentions in that respect don't oversaturate the story, as perhaps in other literature (I can think of Ayn Rand as an example of a story over-saturated with philosophy).

Pullman's intentions aside, I found his narrative to be clever and real, despite the fantastical subject matter. It presented itself as a tale of self-actualization and realization that no matter how alone we may feel at times in our world, that by changing our perspectives (as by looking through an "Amber Spyglass" in the third book of the trilogy) we can see we are never alone within ourselves. The little voice inside your head, the parts of you that you would consider your spirit and your soul, are always there beside you to catch you when you fall. And to try and separate yourself from them is the most heinous brand of self-mutilation.

To say that I would recommend this trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) to anyone with an open mind should be implicit. I adored these books, and would like to discuss them with others.

My next adventures in reading-land are going to be Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and to finish Truman Capote's In Cold Blood...which I never finished because it made for some disturbing dreams when read just before falling asleep at night.