Books, 2008
1. God's Secretaries, by Adam Nicholson, 2. American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang, 3. Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper 4. The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper, 5. Greenwitch, by Susan Cooper, 6. The Grey King, by Susan Cooper, 7. The Silver on the Tree, by Susan Cooper, 8. Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.

9. The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman

Neither Mrs. Coulter nor Lord Asriel should have ever been allowed to procreate. What horrible people! And the monkey: evil! evil! evil!

Lyra isn't actually much better -- despite her being the center of the entire novel, I was left with a strangely vague sense of who she really is. (I have a much better sense of Lee Scorsby, or even Mrs. Coulter. I don't know what makes Lyra tick.) She's neither interesting nor particularly defined, and the whole proto-Mary Sue thing with the alethiometer, well, I know kids do the darndest things, but that's pretty darned. Maybe that's the point: she's neither interesting nor well-defined.

The plot is satisfying to chew on -- the Gobblers are sufficiently scary (especially once we find out what it is they do), and the mysteries of the metaplot are sufficiently mysterious (Dust? What is it, and what does it do? Tune in next week! Or possibly the week after!).

But the world-building is fantastic. I love the world Pullman has built for Lyra to live in. Perhaps I should take up Lyra's Oxford when we're done with this series. The daemons, the Church, the hints of where and how things verged away from our world; the Gyptians, Jordan College, Muscovy. It's all fascinating. I'm not sure where the witches fit in, precisely, but the rest of it is top-notch. (Although the Church seems a bit too England-focused, from my reading. I only had a very vague notion of what the rest of the world looked like, politically. Not that Lyra would care or anything, but I want to know.)

In conclusion: both Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel are horrible people and child abusers, Lyra is a nice idea, and the daemons rock.

I remember liking the book a good deal when I first read it five years ago, and it transpires that I still like it a good deal. Jolly good show!

10. The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman.

I adore Mary Malone. I think she's awesome. And I like Will a lot, too -- I think he's much better drawn than Lyra. I have a better sense of him than her, I guess.

The Specters are horrific, but I'm not sure they're madness in our world (or maybe they're a certain type of madness). But the idea that kids can't see them and adults can't flee them -- those two people on horseback who had to run, and Serafina's reaction to them when she realized that sometimes cowardice is necessary to continue a journey. That's such a fascinating little point. He's got a lot of those types of things, all over the place.

I'll write more about this when I do the write-up for The Amber Spyglass, but I love the Dust plot. It's fascinating as a metaphor for God and consciousness and wisdom. (Although I have no idea why he picked 33,000 years. It's not scientifically supported as an important date for anything.)

I completely agree with the appreciation for the fact that daemons are sometimes not what you would have wanted them to be. That's such a great idea. (There's also the sailor whose daemon was a dolphin -- sometimes you just really always feel out of place and discontent.) I'm not sure what he was going for with the opposite gender thing, and it turns out, neither does he, which makes me feel a lot better. It might mean that we all have a bit of gender variance in us, but I would have either liked a stronger explanation, or a lack of emphasis on the fact that daemons are always the opposite sex. (I never think of daemons as gendered, actually. Except when I'm writing HDM fic.)

Sir Charles is a freaky creep, and I don't think that was an undertone, I think that was an explicit connection. Especially since Sir Charles was sleeping with Mrs. Coulter at the time.

I think time moves differently, but that bothered me, too. And how did he find all these other people from other worlds to help him when he had to kill Roger to get the first bridge out? The timing for building coalitions doesn't work very well, either.

I like the idea that is expressed in your nutshell thesis -- it's the organization-chaos problem in physics -- but once more, I dislike Pullman's attempt to personify everything. If we're talking about forces generally (like gravity is a power), then maybe. But if we're talking about people or entities, whoever the "those who want us to know" and "those who want us to obey", well, I guess I'm a lot more of an atheist than Pullman lays out in this world. Because I'm really uncomfortable with that level of anthropomorphization in the general case. (In the individual, with the Metatron and the angels and whatnot, it's better. Although I have a lot to say about that, too, when I post on The Amber Spyglass.)

11. The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman.

I love this series. lunabee34 commented about The Subtle Knife that it is what she had hoped Harry Potter would be. I agree for the reasons she said it (although I disagree for a number of other reasons): these books are complicated, just like life, and characters change and grow in complicated ways, and they react to their world, and....

Pullman bit off an awful lot. Perhaps a bit too much.

For one, Father Gomez? There were better ways to show insane dedication to a false cause (or to give Balthamos something to do after he ran away).

For another, why, exactly, did the Dust start disappearing faster? Mary thinks it's for some other reason than the gaps between universes, but that's never made clear. If it was just Lord Asriel's gaping maw and the Consistorial Court's bomb, well then. But Pullman implies there was something else, not-opening-related, and then never picks up that thread again.

For a third, what connection to the series does Lord Asriel's quest to destroy "God" have? It has nothing to do with the Dust plot, really. The best I can come up with is that it's a plot-contrivance to get Lord Asriel to kill Roger and create a big honking hole in the universe. (And also give Mrs. Coulter a reason to redeem herself.) And if that's the case, what's the point?! Other than some ax-grindy thing of Pullman's.

[As an aside: when the angels close that hole that is the abyss, what happens to the endlessly falling Metatron, Asriel, and Marisa?]

And why, oh why, is it Lyra and Will having sex that makes the Dust return? I cannot express strongly enough my dislike for this part of the series. I hate it. I hate that it brings back my old nemesis the Sole Savior™. I dislike that it involves a couple of kids having sex, as if that's a solution to anything (I know she's grown a lot over the course of the three books, but it seems not only really out of character, but also way too young for the person Lyra was only a few months earlier). And did I mention that I hate the fact that one (or possibly two) person is so fucking important to the fate of the universe?

As much as I love this series, when I finished it (both times I've read it), I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth -- because Pullman's ultimate message suggested to me that he has a paucity of imagination. He wasn't writing a book, he was making an argument, and I can't shake the feeling that Pullman needed a lot less of his own issues and a lot more confidence to let the world he'd created stand on its own two feet. (Of course, the more articles I read about him, the more I think this. Die, author, die!)

Also: the Alethiometer (the golden compass -- and I know he wanted to call it Northern Lights, but I think The Golden Compass is a much stronger title) was really important (in the beginning, and then less so as time went on, which irritated me. I know it's perhaps not fair to Pullman, but I read that as a gendered problem, as the story moved from being Lyra's to being Will's). The Subtle Knife was really important, from even before we found out about it. The Amber Spyglass? Not really that important. And Mary? Well, he could have done so much more with Mary. I love Mary.

Also, I think he's got a very weird view of love, to narrow it so viciously to something that Will and Lyra will only ever feel for each other, and to imply that their love for other people can't also redouble their love for each other. More love begets more love, in my world. Yes, even romantic love.

But the idea that God is Dust is consciousness, and intelligence, and creativity and exploration and sentience and love, is great. Huzzahs all around for Pullman for that. And the world! Oh, I love that world.

12. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick.

The 2008 Caldecott Medal winner, this book is amazing. It's part graphic novel, part picture book, part novel -- it's gorgeous.

But it's not quite what I would have liked it to be. The drawings are amazing, both Selznick's of Hugo's life and the ones by Georges Méliès, but the story just isn't quite there. The writing is pedestrian (the biggest result of my immersion in writing fanfiction? I keep rewriting the books I'm reading, so that they read better).

Hugo is interesting, as is Isabelle, but not that interesting. The undeniable drama of their lives -- the tragedies that have befallen all the characters (since it's the depths of the Great Depression and all) just aren't quite real to me. Maybe that's because the book is mostly from Hugo's point of view, but he never quite feels like a kid who's lost everyone in his life.

I loved it, and I'd recommend it to anyone, but it would be more for the idea -- which is brilliant -- than for the actual story.

13. Just An Ordinary Day, by Shirley Jackson.

I first read "The Lottery" around about the time all people first read The Lottery, and was properly blown away by Jackson's brilliance and scariness. That story is, of course, brilliant, and really, really creepy.

I love short stories generally, and now that I've read others by Jackson, I can honestly say she is one of the best short story writers I've ever read. And she was prolific, which is awesome. All the stories in this collection are great, but since there are so many of them, I don't really have anything to say about any individual one, except that they are really, really good. Well, that's not quite true -- both versions of "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith" are absolutely fantastic, and I love that there are two versions -- that she kept and published both versions.

14. The Transformation of Authorship in America, by Grantland S. Rice

So the theory is that at some point in the early days of America, authors were invented. That is, writing used to be more of a collective, political event, a participatory event, and it became, through a variety of reasons and means, an act of individual creation, and this change can be traced through literature and law.

After reading Rice's argument, I buy it. And not only that, the book gave me a whole new appreciation for copyright law and my current ambivalence toward it: copyright was originally invented for and by publishers and booksellers, not by authors.