Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman

I read this one on the train on the way to see Rick Riordan at Wellesley Booksmith. What a great day!

I was a little worried about this book because Lyra's Oxford was just so weird and read like a writing exercise that they decided to publish to make more money off of suckers like me. I needn't have worried. This is just a fantastic story about how Lee Scoresby and Iorek Byrnison first meet. I loved having those characters back with me, and I loved the glimpse into Lyra's post-Spyglass life. I am probably missing an important and obvious connection, but who is the Tom that she writes to? Is that just an indication that she moved on after Will?

One of my old pet peeves did surface, though. The double-page excerpt from The Elements of Aerial Navigation interrupts a sentence. I actually had to flip the pages back and forth a few times because I thought I had mistakenly skipped a page. With all that we can do with book design, why can't we plan these asides so that they don't disrupt the flow of reading?

I haven't tried out the game yet. I'm torn between wanting to see it and wanting to keep my book in pristine condition. Any thoughts?

George's Secret Key to the Universe by Lucy & Stephen Hawking

I really thought this one was terrible. The science was interesting, but too much like science fiction, so that it seemed like fantasy. The writing was good enough, but some of the themes were disturbing. I think the ending was supposed to be a coming-together of all the different factions, but it message of the book seemed to be that environmentalists are against all technology and innovation, and that it’s okay if we destroy this planet because science can find us a new one.

I would love someone to explain to me the visual references to The Little Prince. They were far too obvious to be accidental, and yet nothing was really made of them. I just can’t see George as a modern-day Little Prince.

The book design was atrocious. My reading was often disrupted mid-sentence by sidebars and pages of photographs. I enjoyed the sidebars- they were better than the story, but the placement of them was problematic. Likewise, the photos were cool, but they weren’t placed near the relevant content in the book, and often came in the middle of the chapter. When I reached the end of the photos, I had to go back and reread the last page of text to get back into the story. We’ve made such strides in design recently, that there’s really no excuse for this.

It always makes me sad when books like this get so much press because of their authors when so many wonderful books are ignored.