I've been meaning to create a link on the side to my friend Jeff's livejournal, Shelf Life. He talks about books a lot, which I like... and when he's not talking about books he's usually talking about his rescue greyhound, Dash... which I also like.

In a post today, he mentioned a conversation he and I had yesterday about Philip Pullman's Dark Materials Trilogy. I had read the first two books a couple of years ago but never got around to The Amber Spyglass, the final book. So, I recently read all three of them over the course of a week.

They are in serious contention for my favorite books ever. They're fucking brilliant and they completely transcend their classification as children's literature. I only wish such brilliant books had existed for me to read in my more tender years.

I wish I could claim to have come up with my clever "anti-Narnia" comment on my own, but it's something I read in an interview with Pullman on a website. But I think it's very true. Most kid lit tends to be rather cruel to children, there's often outright cruelty or a subtext of it. Not so in these books. The two children who are our lead characters are the most upright and moral characters in the story, which isn't to say that they're perfect or that they always make the right decisions.

Anyways... Dark Materials... parallel universes, Miltonian themes, dark matter, fallen angels, death in spades, witches, daemons(!!), moral uncertainty and characters who are so very human in that there are no evil or good characters. There are only people making choices and growing and learning and making mistakes and... oh for god's sakes... READ THEM!!!!