The books are quite wonderful, actually (and should you happen to be on a long car trip, I also highly recommend the audio version). I generally refuse to see films of books I read as a child and hence have not seen the Narnia movie or any but the first of the Lord of Rings movies or (shudder) the travesty that is The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.
Pullman’s books weren’t published until I was in college, so I am not quite so attached to them—though since I almost never go to the movies, I may well miss this one, too.

by Laura—Dec 2, 08:38 PM

I’ll keep that in mind for our next road trip.

FWIW, I know the LotR movies before I read Tolkien, and thought them much better. Peter Jackson cared about the characters much more than Tolkien did.

by greg—Dec 2, 08:44 PM

I’m much more fond of The Hobbit than I am of LotR, but the movie, for the most part, didn’t look at all the way I imagined that Middle Earth would look. There’s a line in one of Lionel Trilling’s essays (I can’t find it now, of course) about how there are books that you outgrow but never get over. Many of the books I read when I was young feel that way to me: nothing I have read since is so vivid, or so tangible.

by Laura—Dec 2, 10:00 PM

I know that feeling. Many of Orson Scott Card’s novels transported me when I was a teenager; Sons and Lovers and Moby-Dick were magic as late as 19. But I haven’t had anything affect me similarly since.

by greg—Dec 2, 10:04 PM

I was like that with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Then a year or two before I went to college, a switch just flipped somewhere, and reading them seemed like a particularly juvenile chore.

I’ve heard he died recently, without finishing his series.

by JH—Dec 3, 05:52 AM