Discovering the Golden Compass

Book Excerpt: A Note to Newcomers

Anyone trying to navigate his way through the film adaptations of His Dark Materials?without having read the books?is going to need his own golden compass.

?Jennifer Vineyard, for MTV.com

Jennifer is right.

This book is your own golden compass to His Dark Materials, comprised of three books: The Golden Compass (399 pages), The Subtle Knife (326 pages), and The Amber Spyglass (518 pages), totaling 1,243 pages (based on the U.S. trade editions). Since 1995, these books have sold fourteen million copies and won numerous, prestigious awards.

If you are planning to see The Golden Compass at the movie theater or planning to read the trilogy and want to know more about Pullman and his fiction, be forewarned that there are dozens of books already out on His Dark Materials, most of them written for scholars, with subjects and approaches catering to the academic community.

There's even a 542-page encyclopedia, The Elements of His Dark Materials, by Laurie Frost, a necessarily detailed and definitive book that explores every nook and cranny of the trilogy. Due to the complex, ambitious, and thought-provoking storyline of His Dark Materials, it doesn"t lend itself to simplified explanations or abbreviated plot summaries. Although Frost?s book is an outstanding resource, it?s not for the casual reader. (For the hardcore fan, though, it?s simply indispensable.)

I think what the average newcomer to the Pullman universe wants to know is a little about the books and the author, so as not to feel totally lost and disoriented, like Alice who fell in a rabbit hole and found herself in Wonderland.

I hope you?ll be interested enough in Pullman?s ambitious and magnificent story to want to explore further and find out more about the storyteller and His Dark Materials, which is why I?ve written this book?your passport to Pullman?s imaginative universe.