I want YOUR opinion

[Poll #296012]

His Dark Materials. Read it.

I was thinking about how the most radical book(s) I have read in the last year is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I read the first one, The Golden Compass last summer, but didn't get to the second and the third volumes until the fall. I think it's funny that all these would-be-book-burning fundamentalist groups are all over Harry Potter, but this trilogy seemingly eluded their radar because it would make them foam at the mouth because its underlying philosophy is explicit secular humanism. It has the intelligence, the sophistication and the ethics of a C.S.Lewis work, but Pullman comes to his ethics via a secular cosmology. It's a "children's book," but only in the sense that it's a fantasy with characters who are 13 years old, and there are talking bears, but I would recomment it to any adult and every kid. Philosophical discussions will ensue.

Here are several reasons why this trilogy rocks,

( obviously with spoilers )

Go read it now.
totalvirility, do you have anything to add?