{"id":10501,"date":"2007-04-28T19:28:39","date_gmt":"2007-04-28T23:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/04\/28\/10501.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:26","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:26","slug":"book-report-the-golden-compass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/04\/28\/book-report-the-golden-compass\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Golden Compass"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger first read The Golden Compass<\/a> perhaps five years ago and thought it was magnificent. I was knocked out, blown away and utterly, um, pleased. I read The Subtle Knife<\/I> shortly after, and it was quite good, although I remember being a bit disappointed. Still, second book in a trilogy is always tricky, isn’t it? We finished (my Best Reader and I, who I’m pretty sure read Compass<\/I> aloud as a bedtime book, and I think Knife<\/I> as well) just about in time for the release of The Amber Spyglass<\/I> in hardback, and we shelled out twenty dollars (or perhaps less, I don’t recall and we don’t seem to have used the receipt as a bookmark, or at least didn’t leave it in the book) and dove right in. About halfway through Spyglass<\/I> I was through. It left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole series. My feeling, now, is that I disliked His Dark Materials<\/I>, which I did. But I forget that I liked The Golden Compass<\/I>.\n

So, what with one thing and another, I didn’t reread the book for five years. Which you’ll know, Gentle Reader, is not my way with a book that I like, particularly if I have it in paperback. And I was scrounging for a bathtub book the other day, feeling peevish and whatnot, and knowing, besides, that I wasn’t going to have enough time to soak in the tub because the Youngest Member is not a patient sort of person, and I didn’t want to read a Vorkosigan book again, and I didn’t want to read a Dick Francis again, or a Laurie King, or a Dianne Wynne Jones, or ... dammit there must be something<\/I> to read on these bookshelves. Fine. I’ll read The Golden Compass<\/I>.\n

And you know what? It’s a great book. It’s extraordinary. The characters—not so much our heroine Lyra, who is not a plausible child but interesting nonetheless, but the incidental ones, Farder Coram and Lord Faa, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, Lee Scoresby and Serafina Pekkala, Iorek Byrneson and Pantalaimon. And the world, the ominous Magisterium, the powerful armored bears of the north, the d\ufffdmons, the gyptians, the Gobblers. It’s simultaneously a dazzling world of surface images and an iceberg world where it feels like we are only seeing ten percent of the world, that most of the world exists<\/I> without making it into this story. Just wonderful.\n

And now I have to exercise my self-control, and not read the other ones. Or see the movie. Because this time, I should quit while I’m ahead.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger first read The Golden Compass perhaps five years ago and thought it was magnificent. I was knocked out, blown away and utterly, um, pleased. I read The Subtle Knife shortly after, and it was quite good, although…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18013,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10501\/revisions\/18013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}