Is it Evil?
I've resisted reading Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass for years because of everything I've heard about it being "evil." Anti-Catholic, anti-religion, anti-God, anti-whatever. The author is a self-proclaimed atheist who I heard wanted to write a fantasy series that didn't deal with God and spirituality in the same way most fantasies do.
I should have known better than to let the fact that people said a book was "evil" to stop me. After all, most of my favorite books, like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and heck, let's throw the Book of Mormon in there, have been considered "evil" by one group or another.
Then in my college YA lit class, we received a template for one of our assignments and the template used The Golden Compass for an example. And I read that in The Golden Compass, people's souls lived on the outside of their body in forms called daemons, and the template posed the question, "But what happens when people try to separate a soul from its body?" The concept blew my mind.
Should I read it? I shouldn't read it. Should I read it? I shouldn't read it. I didn't know if I wanted to support a book that was anti-religion and anti-God.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it. In fact, I dreamed about the book and concept all night, and a few nights thereafter. It sounded right up my alley.
