Is it safe?

[orangerful]

I finished reading 'Marathon Man' last week and the DVD just arrived from Netflix! I'm really interested to see what the movie is like, though I'm scared to death of the "Is it safe?" scene! My teeth hurt just thinking about it!

I'm about halfway through 'Amber Spyglass' now. Not sure where the hell that is going!

So, Lyra and Will have just arrived in the "suburbs of the dead" (that sounds like a really cheesy horror movie...). We just had the whole "keep your death near" speech from the dying grandmother's death. Creepy. Lyra is lying her head off, as usual. I'm trying to figure out what that means, exactly. The fact that she's a pathological liar. I'm hoping it has some bigger meaning later. Or not. Maybe it's just because she's a kid. But her mother is a superb liar too. No one ever seems to get angry at Lyra lying either - Will and the lilliputians (I can't remember their names and I have no idea how to spell them...lady slavakia and chevaliyay?) just went right along with her.

Mary just learned how to see Dust in the Mulefa world. She just had the old Mulefa explain their history to her. I want to see a picture of these creatures! I hope the movies do well enough for them to make the third one because I want to see them rolling around on the seed pods. I can't quite wrap my head around the description.

Mrs Coulter, not sure what to do with her. Or Asriel. Neither of them is particularly nice or pleasant. Both of them are lying liars.

Something tells me that when I'm done with this series, I'm going to want to read all the literary criticism on it that i can find!

Comments

[bittertwee.livejournal.com]

crap- the bad thing about using tabbed browsing is that when one window crashes and causes everything to close, you lose a half written comment in another window, which is how I lost what I just wrote.

Anyway, I think what I said is that yes, Amber Spyglass is a weighty book which has a "masterpiece" feel to it. I'm familiar with atheist/humanist issues, and the biblical stories, so that helped a lot when trying to figure out what Pullman is getting at. I haven't read Paradise Lost (which the book is based on, apparently) and I'm sure that would have helped. (I just looked up Paradise Lost on Wikipedia, and I'm intrigued.. Now I want to read it and then go back and read the Dark Materials Books again. In all my spare time..)

I guess what surprised me (no spoilers, don't worry) was that Pullman didn't just write negative things about "the Church" or organized religion, or whatever it is that he's unhappy with. He also offers a positive alternative. He seems to be saying that the old stories or ways of looking at things just aren't working anymore and are shutting out so much of what is good about life. So it's time for a new story. So the question I asked myself as I read was- what is he setting up as an alternative? Thinking about that helped me make sense of things as I read, although I'm sure I don't have anywhere close to the whole answer.