"His Dark Materials"—Read It, Unless...

Well, I finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy the other day and loved it. The ending moved me as much as any I can think of. It's one of the most poignant, sweetly sorrowful situations I've ever seen a writer put characters in. And thinking about it, I have to say it wasn't so much that I cared about the characters. It was more how much they cared about each other.

It's the kind of book you recommend to all your friends, except in this case I'm not going to push it on people who are religious. Pullman is an atheist, and the book vividly illustrates the abuses of religion, and in its hypothetical world there is no divinity as we know it, no separate, pure realm apart from the world we see around us. But the real energy goes into arguing that we ought to treat each other well in this, the one world we can all agree on the existence of. The books may be explicitly antireligious, but I still feel like I'm a slightly better person for having read them.