His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

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elysium
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His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#1

Post by elysium »

Anyone else here a fan of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust series? It's been more than a decade since I read the former, so my memory of the plot is a bit hazy, but they remain some of my absolute favourite books. Still want to have a dæmon of my own, haha.

Anyway I did read the first book of The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, a lot more recently, and I loved it. And the next book of that, The Secret Commonwealth, just came out. Probably won't get a chance to read it any time soon, but I'm very hyped about this.

Anyway, there's also previews for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ ... ok-of-dust

https://www.waterstones.com/blog/a-snea ... volume-two
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Re: His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#2

Post by Rakuen Growlithe »

Nope. I've heard of it but never read it.
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Re: His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#3

Post by Adagio »

elysium wrote: Fri Oct 04, 2019 7:15 am Anyone else here a fan of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust series? It's been more than a decade since I read the former, so my memory of the plot is a bit hazy, but they remain some of my absolute favourite books. Still want to have a dæmon of my own, haha.

Anyway I did read the first book of The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, a lot more recently, and I loved it. And the next book of that, The Secret Commonwealth, just came out. Probably won't get a chance to read it any time soon, but I'm very hyped about this.

Anyway, there's also previews for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ ... ok-of-dust

https://www.waterstones.com/blog/a-snea ... volume-two
I'm looking for a physical copy of those. I want to read them.
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Re: His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#4

Post by elysium »

It must be said that they're not going to be everyone's cup of tea. They're fairly controversial works at times. Without spoiling too much, the overarching storyline is decidedly anti-theistic, and Pullman is especially unflattering about Catholicism (or a form thereof existing in the world of the series, at least). He's stated before that he intends the books to be an anti-Narnia, because he finds Narnia to be offensive in a number of ways. I read the books for the first time back in 2007, in preparation for seeing The Golden Compass film - my mother was very excited about the movie coming out, and I had been told previously I should wait a bit to read them because they were a bit "inappropriate" for younger kids or somesuch because of the atheism, so then because the movie was coming out I said sod it, I'm reading them before we see the film (which was decent for what was there of the book, but the upcoming TV show is going to be better). But yeah, reading them was wild, because at the same time there were a lot of panicked chain emails from religious groups about "corrupting the children", to the point that a particularly religious classmate of mine at the time politely offered to exorcise me when seeing me reading The Subtle Knife haha.

The main furry appeal is in the concept of dæmons, the manifestation of a person's soul in animal form that is always near them. If you want something a little less intense, but keeping the animal familiars concept somewhat, there is also a novel called Zoo City by local author Lauren Beukes, which is set in Hillbrow and involves people having animal familiars permanently attached to them as a result of performing immoral actions. I wasn't mad about the specific story being told (it's a neonoir thing involving searching for missing child recording artists and muthi and whatnot), and I was a bit disappointed that the metaphysics of being "animalled" wasn't explored more (unlike in HDM, where you learn quite a bit about the nature of dæmons by the end). That said, the hook was interesting, the idea of permanent, obvious markers for guilt (and their being living, breathing animals), the fact that these animals also imbue new abilities (the main character, for instance, gains the ability to find missing objects as a result of being animalled) which added an extra kink to the idea (you gain something useful, but you lose social status/suffer a form of "damnation" - provides an interesting moral dilemma that wasn't really ever explored), and I liked the fairly postmodern way in which the novel was written, where there were random snippets from in-universe academic articles and newspaper clippings and things like that scattered in between chapters. There was also supposed to be a film adaptation of this that never panned out?
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Re: His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#5

Post by Rakuen Growlithe »

Zoo City does sound pretty cool from that summary. I should maybe look into it. But I already have a long list of things I want to read. x.x
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
~John Milton~
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Re: His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#6

Post by Trace »

Ooh, yes!
I love the His Dark Materials series. It does get a bit heavy handed at points, but I love the world and have always loved the concept of everyone having animal formed Daemons. If you can look past the anti-theistic message of the books, there is a lot to like about them. Great characters, a really compelling universe and a pretty good story. It has a pretty decent amount of furry appeal, too.
I am looking forward to seeing how they handle the upcoming series.
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Re: His Dark Materials / The Book of Dust

#7

Post by Arentor Iceshine »

This was one of my first trilogies and it's amazing! How the world evolves across the books and the sheer scale is epic! What struck me most was the inclusion of the angels Baruch and Balthamos, which was really uplifting for me.
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