So last night I inadvertently finished Book 2 of His Dark Materials. I say inadvertently because it’s a 3-in-1 book, so I have no decent idea when one book is going to end, making the flow of the story not at all like intended I think….making it too easy to just “keep reading” instead of just experiencing each book as a singular entity.

But anyways, the story is getting more and more exciting. The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, a boy from an England much more like ours than Lyra’s, who has to watch over his mother. Her ailing mental health makes it very easy to be noticed, something Will tries to avoid. Will discovers a curtain in the air leading to another world where he meets Lyra and sets out to find his father, who disappeared on an Arctic expedition when Will was a baby.

Featuring angels, witches and violent, vengeful Churches, the story continues on it’s atheistic slant of blaming God for the problems caused in the world by the Church and setting out to kill him and restart the world in Man’s image. Despite this slant, I can’t help but enjoy the adventures of Will and Lyra…this fantastic take on parallel worlds and the nature of the soul have sucked me in as only really good fiction stories can. So despite the “atheistic tendencies”, I would recommend this trilogy as much as I recommended The Da Vinci Code (once I realized that it was fiction and not 100% true*). But lets save recommendations and stuff until I finish the last book and see what they actually do to God….

* It’s not my fault The Da Vinci Code confused me…in the beginning of the book, they have that blurb that says that all descriptions of artwork, scrolls, etc are accurate and that led me to believe that the theories derived from those accurately described items were fact. *mutter*…fine it’s my fault…just don’t let it happen again!