freebooter posted:

I'm glad somebody enjoyed it, because I found it quite the opposite: bloated and sprawling and unimaginative and I was even falling asleep during some of it. It has its moments (the Prague chapter was genuinely good) but it mostly struck me, like its predecessor, as a book written by a famous author whom editors daren't challenge anymore. It was the bloat that really bugged me. 200 pages into Northern Lights and we're already well into the second act, Lyra meeting Iorek Byrnison for the first time; 200 pages into the Secret Commonwealth and we're still faffing about with tedious amateur spy crap in Oxford and there's another 450 pages to go but they no longer seem like something to anticipate.

I think my main complaint is that the world he presents no longer seems quite magical. It just feels like our own world, with furry friends. We gets hints of stuff, like the distant citadel in the desert, but the rest of it is a German writer working at his desk or a shoehorned refugees-in-the-Meditteranean moment or the dull politics of the Calvinist church (this was not interesting in the original trilogy and I don't know why he thought it would be interesting here).