Showing posts with label Philip Pullman-His Dark Materials Series. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philip Pullman-His Dark Materials Series. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

His Dark Materials Series ~ The Amber Spyglass



Summary:A complex web of thoughts was weaving itself in the bear king's mind, with more strands in it than hunger and satisfaction. There was the memory of the little girl Lyra, whom he had named Silvertongue, and whom he had last seen crossing the fragile snow bridge across a crevasse in his own island of Svalbard. Then there was the agitation among the witches, the rumors of pacts and alliances and war; and then there was the surpassingly strange fact of this new world itself, and the witch's insistence that there were many more such worlds, and that the fate of them all hung somehow on the fate of the child.
Meanwhile, two factions of the Church are vying to reach Lyra first. One is even prepared to give a priest "preemptive absolution" should he succeed in committing mortal sin. For these tyrants, killing this girl is no less than "a sacred task."
PDF Version:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2924282/HisDarkMaterials-TheAmberSpyglass.pdf.html
TXT Version:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2924300/HisDarkMaterials-TheAmberSpyglass.txt.html

His Dark Materials Series ~ The Subtle Knife ( Book 2 )



Summary: As the novel opens, Will's enemies will do anything for information about his missing father, a soldier and Arctic explorer who has been very much airbrushed from the official picture. Now Will must get his mother into safe seclusion and make his way toward Oxford, which may hold the key to John Parry's disappearance. But en route and on the lam from both the police and his family's tormentors, he comes upon a cat with more than a mouse on her mind: "She reached out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to Will." What seems to him a patch of everyday Oxford conceals far more: "The cat stepped forward and vanished." Will, too, scrambles through and into another oddly deserted landscape--one in which children rule and adults (and felines) are very much at risk. Here in this deathly silent city by the sea, he will soon have a dustup with a fierce, flinty little girl: "Her expression was a mixture of the very young--when she first tasted the cola--and a kind of deep, sad wariness." Soon Will and Lyra (and, of course, her dæmon, Pantalaimon) uneasily embark on a great adventure and head into greater tragedy.

PDF Version:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2924239/HisDarkMaterials-TheSubtleKnife.pdf.html
TXT Version:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2924250/HisDarkMaterials-TheSubtleKnife.txt.html

His Dark Materials Series ~ The Golden Compass ( Book 1)



Summary: As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. She had formed the notion that it was concerned with magic, with the movements of the stars and planets, with tiny particles of matter, but that was guesswork, really. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them.Not that Lyra spends much time worrying about it; what she likes best is "clambering over the College roofs with Roger the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war." But Lyra's carefree existence changes forever when she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, first prevent an assassination attempt against her uncle, the powerful Lord Asriel, and then overhear a secret discussion about a mysterious entity known as Dust. Soon she and Pan are swept up in a dangerous game involving disappearing children, a beautiful woman with a golden monkey daemon, a trip to the far north, and a set of allies ranging from "gyptians" to witches to an armor-clad polar bear.

PDF Version:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2923975/HisDarkMaterials-TheGoldenCompass.pdf.html
TXT Version:
http://www.ziddu.com/download/2924208/HisDarkMaterials1-TheGoldenCompass.txt.html