by Philip Pullman

There are books that you can read while laying flat on a mattress, and there are books you have to sit up to read. The Amber Spyglass, the final installment in the His Dark Materials trilogy is one of the latter. Despite the fact that I was nursing the cold that wouldn’t die while reading it, I was completely upright, reading about Lyra and Will, and their final journey through the world of the dead, and back to their own separate universes, finding love, and maturity, along the way.

Is it wrong of me to wish that my Zorro-dog was really a daemon like Pantalaimon, not for the shape-changing feature (which goes away once you reach a certain level of maturity anyway) but for the ability to communicate? As I was reading about Lyra and Pan I was often distracted by their relationship, wishing I could explain to Zorro why he’s taking all these pills.

Even so, it was a satisfying end to the story, and I’m probably going to pick up Lyra’s Oxford as well.