I finally got around to watching the movie last night, and I thought it was very good! It's been awhile since I read the book, so it's a little difficult to compare the two, but one thing I did notice was that the portion of the book I found very disturbing was not glossed over in the movie, but was toned down, at least from what I remembered reading. I won't say any more in this first post, I don't want anyone seeing it by accident.

Here are some links for us to take a look at:

The official movie site (has a place to meet your own Daemon, we were all doing this one earlier in a separate thread when the movie came out)

Phillip Pullman's Website

A study guide by bookrags (may ask you to pay for full download, per GateGypsy, I haven't tried it, so not sure if this is worthwhile or not)

A study guide by Sparknotes

A study guide by Concordia Publishing House (I'm a little wary of this one, as it's to be used in bible study discussions, and didn't want to offend/upset anyone)

NOTE: I haven't read through these questions and guides myself, and am not holding one up over the other, I didn't really think about it being controversial myself, as I'm not bothered by religious or anti-religious themes in fiction, I'm more of a did I like the story or not person, rather than reading them as a message. So please, keep your thoughts open on this one, as religion is a sticky subject always in discussion, don't be afraid to discuss it, because it's a major theme here, but also don't be hurt by what others might say, as I know this group would never intentionally hurt do that to each other. Thanks! :hug:

Awesome :cheesy: <-- I wanted to clap :wink: Glad to see this up! I fell asleep reading this book the other night.... not 'cause it's dull, but because I have to be awake at 430 every morning :lol: I'll check out some of the study guide questions and come back another time. Thanks for hunting up these questions, Shaunesay!

ETA: I downloaded the PDF of the Concordia study guide. The bookrags one was only partial and wanted me to pay to read the rest, so I quit with that. I'll read more of the sparknotes one when I'm further through the book. The movie website is pretty neat (I downloaded the iPod and PSP "posters" :giggle:) and did the "meet your daemon" quiz. Apparently my daemon is named Skaene, and he's a tiger. I think my older sister would have been jealous.
It gave me this really awesome thing to put on my blog (which I totally did!) but it won't work here, so I'm lucky it also gave me a link to send y'all to so you can comment : http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/?1225534

neat. I can see why y'all were doing it when the movie first came out! Where is that thread?

We almost rented the movie this weekend (I really wanted to!!) but I have to wait 'til the book gets read, first.

More another time!

I'm waiting to get the movie until after I've read the book. Had a bit of a tough time getting into it, but I just picked up the unabridged cds to listen to at work.

That's not cheating, right? I just figure if I listen at work and read at home, it might propel me to finish it.

no, that's not cheating! ;) I absolve you! ;)

There are a lot of books that I enjoyed that I might not have read otherwise, just because the reader was great!

Heh, I hadn't even known you were doing this book this month! I read it sometime a year or two ago but I just watched the movie over the weekend, again without realizing it was the book of the month up for discussion here. So neat, I may be able to somewhat participate based on my recent movie viewing. :)

From what I recall, the movie held pretty true to the book.

My review, if you're interested, can be found here. There's not really any spoilers there.

I wonder if the thing that Shaunie referred to is the same thing I wrote about that bugged me.... and if so, yes I was pleasantly surprised that the words "original sin" were not mentioned in the movie.

Ooo! I recently finished the trilogy. Here's my journal entry for the first book: Northern Lights / Golden Compass.

Speaking of spoilers, one I thing I've noticed is that a lot of sites talk about the trilogy as a whole. I deliberately waited to visit any sites until I'd finished the first book, but even so there were lots of spoilers :angry2: about the *other* books! :nono: Be careful out there!!

I haven't seen the movie but I've watched the trailers. (The Golden Compass in the movie looks *fantastic*, but the bears' armor doesn't look right to me.) GG, I don't know you well enough to comment on your daemon, but what a fun link! And thanks, Cherie, for the link to your review.

We need to get some more discussin' going on here! Where is everyone! :whip:

I think you may have missed Pullman's point, Cherie. The book has an overwhelmingly anti-Christian-Church tone. It's not preachy in the least. I'm looking forward to reading the other books, to see where he's going with it.

I've finally finished reading Northern Lights just today. I'm right now reading the study guides to see what others thought of it, and get my brain percolating. :grin:


:erm: Looks like the Sparknotes are more about the trilogy as a whole, not about the first book, specifically, so I stopped reading it 'cause I didn't want to ruin the rest of the series for myself.

I still haven't watched the movie, but I really want to. I was in Staples a week or so ago, and it happened to be playing on one of the screens. I was shocked, because the scene it was playing was a duel between two Polar Bears, and I hadn't gotten to that part of the book yet. I was rather horrified, to be honest. I remembered that someone here had told me this series is quite heavy and dark and not really something she would recommend that I let my 11 yr old read.

(Having read the book, this one anyway, I don't think it's too dark or violent compared to his war video games, etc. What's really sad is that he doesn't have the religious training/experience to really get or even care about the other levels of the book, which would be heavy and thought provoking, and maybe a bit much for an 11 yr old.)

Has anyone else seen the movie yet? I was going to rent it and put it on my iPod during my vacation, but it wasn't available througth iTunes :sigh:

I hated the movie. I thought it was just horrible, and the people I saw it with (who hadn't read the book) hated it and found it sort of confusing. To each, her own, I guess.

Meanwhile, I really enjoyed the trilogy, but I'm not sure I can remember what happened in the first book and what only happened in the later books. I'll be watching to see if there's more discussion to remind me what's safe to say...

I read the trilogy. Loved the first book and eagerly bought the second which came out shortly after I finished the first. Enjoyed it very much and then I had a long wait for the third book to come out. It was such a disappointment. I didn't like the third one -- I felt icky when I finished it. I can't tell you why, it's just how I remember it.

For me, reading is for entertainment, which means that I make no attempt to remember the plot line or characters. (Maybe that's one reason why I read so fast: I'm not slowing down to think about it.) For me, reading a novel is kind of like watching a movie on the back of my eyelids. Most of the time, within weeks of finishing a book, I am hard-pressed to summarize the plot. There are exceptions, and books which make more of an impression on me.

So, since I read all of these books several years ago, I probably don't have much to contribute to the discussion. In one way, I'm tempted to re-read and try to figure out why I disliked the 3rd book. In another way, I don't want to read it again and because of that I can't see a point in reading the first two. There are so many books in my TBR stacks that if I became a recluse and didn't buy any new books, it would be well more than a year before I ran out of books to read for the first time.

The anti-Catholic stuff (or was it anti-Anglican?) didn't bother me, because I had already accepted that the entire setting was in another universe, not ours, so all the anti-established-Church rhetoric was about a mythical church and religion, not mine. From things I've read, I think that Pullman *was* maligning the traditional hierarchical Church, and young readers are probably not able to push that into a "not here" frame of mind, so it *is* a concern for parents whose children want to read the series. I did my best to not censor my kids' reading, so I think I would have read along and engaged my kids in discussion if they had been interested in the books at an impressionable age.

One thing to keep in mind with this series...Pullman is not anti-Catholic or anti-religious or anti-Christian. He's anti-Establishment. Anti-anything that controls people's lives in the name of religion. Mrs. Coulter, for example, is both a tool of the Establishment (and thus Establishment herself and the controller) but is also used by the Establishment (thus, the controlled). She's a really intriguing character and her journey throughout the trilogy shows what can happen to someone deeply on the "inside" when that person comes up against her own personal feelings (for her daughter) that don't match.

It's not until the third book that the nature of Dust really becomes more clear. So since this is a discussion just of the first book, I won't say any of what I'd like to say about Dust and "original sin" so as to stay spoiler free for those not finished with the trilogy.

The themes come into play even more in the second book. Again, trying to stay spoiler free, but there's a character introduced named Will. It's fairly obvious that he's symbolic of the idea of free will.

There are some great things that Pullman does with the story of Adam and Eve and the "Fall" of man. But again, that can't be discussed without looking at the trilogy as a whole. *sigh* (Can you tell that I want to talk about all three books? *grin*)

Ah, very good. I see what you're getting at. "Anti-Establishment" is probably a much fairer way to describe Pullman :wink: He obviously had great plans for his trilogy, because the first book is clearly constructed with the intentions of books 2 and 3 being necessary. I came out of Golden Compass/Northern Lights knowing that I had to read the rest of the series if I wanted to get anything out of the books, so I understand your need/desire to discuss the trilogy as a whole. If I'd understood this basic nature of the books, perhaps I'd have chosen differently for this read-together. This is not a series where the stories can stand alone by themselves with entertaining story arcs between them (like Anita Blake or The Cat Who or series books like that) -- these books need to be read as a whole to get their value. My apologies for that.

I read all three books in succession during the latter part of 2007. I just saw the movie about 2 weeks ago.

My first thought was that I didn't really understand all the rave reviews for this trilogy. I thought it was "okay". I wasn't blown away by any means. My favorite of the 3 books was the 2nd, although after reading other reviews, I saw that I was in the minority with that opinion. I'd heard all the hype about Pullman being anti-whatever, and I consider myself a fairly good Christian gal, but I went into the reading with an open mind. And I came out that way as well. I wasn't overly offended by anything & like others have said, I tend to read for the enjoyment of reading and just try to enjoy the storyline. Deep underlying meaning often eludes me anyway -- I'm not all into the symbolism, etc. :shrug: I suppose it's all in how you interpret things. I, personally, chose not to interpret it in an offensive way.

As for the movie, I thought it was "okay" as well. I do think I probably appreciated it more after having read the book beforehand. My 8-year-old son enjoyed the movie, and as for the religious undertones, he was clueless.