Le Review: His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (spoilers ahoy!)

I don’t know how, but I’d never heard of this trilogy until the movie The Golden Compass came out, and even then I didn’t pay much attention. It wasn’t until I was creating my fill in the gaps list (and someone at work recommended them to me) that I really looked into them. Set in parallel universes, it’s the coming of age story of Lyra Belacqua (I’m so infatuated with her name!) and Will Parry. It’s also a critique of organised religion, and (thanks Google!) an inversion of the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton.

While there were some bits I didn’t like,  on the whole I really enjoyed reading these books. The doomed lovers bit at the end just annoyed me, but I find all doomed lovers annoying. (This is probably more a reflection on me than the books.) Occasionally I found Pullman’s style a little grating and overly wordy, but to be fair, the scene where Lyra says goodbye to Pan when she sets off for the land of the dead made me bawl my eyes out so it did its job. (I was on the train coming home from work at the time. Embarassed much?)

After I’d finished reading the books I clicked around on some reviews on the interwebs, and found a lot of reviews blasting the books as Anti-Christian. I don’t think that’s true at all, I think the books are against organised religion, or at least the negative aspects of it, but I don’t think there’s any point in there where Pullman is trying to turn us all into atheists.

This morning I started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. By the time I got to Flinders Street I thought I was on the London underground. If it wasn’t for the fact that I need to at least look like I’m doing work, I’d be reading it right now. Instead, I am eating speckles that I just bought at Haighs, and feeling so sad for this kid.

Le procrastination

You know why I love the 22nd of June? Basically its the Wednesday of 2009. It’s a  long slide down to summer from here my friends, and I for one am excited.

Thanks to everyone for the cheering up. This shady character I’ve dreamt up and I sat down and had a frank discussion, and I think we’re on the same page now. (Page 50, to be precise). Have decided to take the attitude that this writing caper is like doing one of those ridiculous jigsaw puzzles – start with the corner pieces and the outside pieces and worry about the five hundred pieces that look like sky later.

Have also discovered The Wire this week. How have I not seen this show before? I bet it was like Six Feet Under and the Sopranos and it was on every third Wednesday at 2am but only if you sit in a red armchair with a green cushion. Stupid Australian television.

I also started reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman as part of the Filling the Gaps project. I am really really enjoying them actually.  They’re kind of wordy in parts, but the religious side of it  is interesting, and all the mythology surrounding it (like the myth of Oedipus). I hadn’t ever heard of these books until The Golden Compass movie, which I didn’t watch due to the whole Nicole-Kidman-being-in-it-thing, and never  got round to reading the books. I have it on reliable authority that the movie is pretty good though, so I shall have to investigate. I will have  an awful lot of time on my hands this time next week. (Incidentally, I absolutely love the name Lyra. I’ve never gotten so worked up over a character’s name before!)

Finally, I present to you a video of one of my new favourite people. There is no greater joy in life than watching this man eat:

His predeliction for cravats is just an added delight really.

Woop-woop!

I finally finished Middlemarch last night (I was literally reading it as I walked home, determined I was)

I’m going to need a little while to process, so in the meantime I direct your attention below:

Moby Dick – Herman Melville (Man versus Whale: Whale wins)

I finally my finished the first book in my quest to fill-in-the-gaps, at 1am this morning. Moby Dick – the story of one man’s monomaniacal obsession to take revenge on the whale that took his leg. This blog post – the story of one girl’s monomaniacal obsession to finish Moby Dick despite the fact that it was like reading a brick.

Now that I have finished, I didn’t hate this book as much as I thought I would. Structurally, its all over the place, which was irritating after a while. The story of Captain Ahab’s voyage of revenge on the Pequod is great reading, but it feels like just as you are being drawn into the story the journey stops while Ishamel spends eight chapters talking about how to chase, catch, kill, string up, decapitate, drain and dispatch a whale, or ponders his existance for thirty pages.

It was so hard to read. Sometimes it was very Shakespearian to read (there were even  stage directions in some chapters).  On top of all the jumping around, the story would leap from Ishmael narrating to a long monologue from Ahab, or a conversation on the deck between the first mates Starbuck and Flask, which made it a bit stop-start for me.

I liked the beginning- even the first few pages, where Ishamel lists all the literary whale references the ’sub sub librarian’ could find. Ishamel meeting Queequeg, the noble savage who would share his adventure on the Pequod,  was hilarious.I liked the end (mainly because I was so glad to get there), but the middle was tough. But as much as I whinged about it on Twitter, in the end, I didn’t hate it. There is a lot to like in Moby Dick, especially this:

Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

It’s paragraphs like that that made up for all the whalekilling. While I did finish the book feeling like I should donate all my money to Sea Shepherds or Greenpeace, I’m glad I read it. It was a literary marathon, but I did it.

Just because I feel some karmic realignment is in order, here is my new absolutely favourite ad (which I point out to my housemate every time I see it, making it not her favourite ad)

Damn the man! Save the empire!

The 100 book challenge has commenced with Moby Dick, which in hindsight was not the smartest of moves. (Initially I was going to read the list in order, but that would make the next book The Iliyad, and I don’t think I will be in any state to read that any time soon).

Am enjoying Moby Dick so far, it’s incredibly dense but the characters are fantastic. Fairly sure I will be braindead by the end though.

Today is cleaning house and listening to the footy on the radio. If I hear one more snide comment about Richmond playing Geelong I will throw something through the window. I firmly believe that if we lose by less than 100 points they should play our theme song anyway. Sigh. One day, Richmond will not make me want to tear my hair out.