The first time I read The Golden Compass was around the time when the movie came out seven or so years ago. I ended up reading the whole series and for the most part enjoyed it even though I had some problems with the final book. Sadly the movie wasn't that great and the whole series never got filmed.The first book in the His Dark Materials series, The Golden Compass, focuses on a young girl, Lyra. She lives in a sort of alternate fantasy universe which is slightly similar to our world except that there are flying witches, talking armored bears, and everyone has a daemon which is a part of them. A daemon is a sort of spirit that is partnered with each human and takes the form of an animal. As a child a person's daemon can change shape to a variety of animals, but as that person matures the daemon takes a static animal form. Lyra is being raised at Oxford College which is run by the alternate universe's equivalent of the Catholic Church. Her "uncle" Lord Asriel is investigating a mysterious phenomenon called Dust while the church is trying to stop him. There is also Mrs. Coulter who is running experiments that involves kidnapping poor children and then trying to separate their daemons from them. So of course Lyra gets involved in both Lord Asriel's and Mrs. Coulter's plottings and also ends up becoming friends with a talking bear and a cowboy from Texas.
There is a lot of stuff going on and Pullman does a great job of building up this world and the politics of how it works. The only problem is that the first book doesn't tell a self contained story at all and, as I recall, by the third book too much stuff is going on and everything gets jumbled up. But I should wait for my report on the final book to go into that. The first book gets an A-.
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