I thought this trilogy was quite good. I have no problems with the contoversey, I see nothing wrong with questioning rules or things that are assumed to be irrefutable. People should actually read things before jumping on the religious band wagon, these books are about so much more. Free thought and speech are not a crime. ( )

My favourite trilogy. These are excellent books. The worlds Pullman describes are just amazing, I couldn't stop reading! Filled me with mixed emotions, especially the ending. ( )

I'm working on reading the rest of these.

un vrai bonheur de lecture à chaque page. On a peur, on pleure, on rit en même temps que l'héroïne. Pullman signe là une trilogie d'une très grande qualité. ( )

One of my best friends absolutely loves the His Dark Materials trilogy and used to mention it or suggest it to me quite often. I always had a lot of other things to read, so I never quite got around to it until November 2007. I forget why exactly I decided to go ahead and purchase it, except that I had some extra book money that month and film for the first book, The Golden Compass, was due to come out, and so the books were pretty much everywhere.

When I sat down to read it, I was expecting something like the Narnia series, since I'd always heard comparisons between the two, only a little more steampunk and less Tolkien-esque fantasy. Happily, His Dark Materials isn't much like The Chronicles of Narnia at all, except that they're both fantasy YA series with a heavy theme of religion. Also, despite the size of the two collections being about equal, HDM was a much quicker read. I guess that's most likely because stuff actually happens in the books and the main characters are actually interesting.

But though I greatly prefer HDM to Narnia, I'm not all that crazy about it. It's a good series, and the overall message is pretty good, being one about scepticism and not blindly following authority just because they're authority, but I felt that it went on a little too long and got a little too diactic towards the end - precisely the problems I have with Narnia, actually.

It's a very cool universe that Pullman created, and the series is a fun read and definitely worth a read, but it just wasn't the kind of book that I like to read. Maybe if it were a few hundred pages shorter and with fewer diversions from Lyra's point of view, I would have liked it much more. ( )