Of the few books that I've read that I truly couldn't put down, the one that stands out the most is The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman, originally published as Northern Lights in the United Kingdom. Though it is the first book in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and its ending still leaves the plot open and unresolved so that the next two books can address it, The Golden Compass is an excellent stand-alone book, and I have never thought back to any story more often than this one. The story takes place in a world that is described as being "like ours, but different in many ways," and follows a young girl, Lyra Belcqua, as she goes around the world in search of her friend and other missing children who have been taken by a group called the Gobblers. She is accompanied by her daemon, Pantalaimon, and an alethiometer. In this case, a daemon is the soul of a human (or witch) who resides outside of the body and serves as a lifelong companion and body-mate in form of an animal; both have distinct personalities and usually act autonomously, but they cannot be separated by more than a few meters without intense pain, and when the distance is too great, both die. Completely different is the alethiometer (from the Greek αλήθεια, meaning "truth"), a device that can be used …show more content…
This is a world wherein people are born into two bodies, one typical and the other metaphysical, that are bound together in such a way that it becomes impossible to be truly alone. That pretense alone has so much potential for a world to have different, but unmistakably human cultural foundations, and Pullman takes advantage of every opportunity to build a world that feels both familiar and strange, much like the feeling that comes with returning somewhere after having been absent for a decade; so much is the same, but even small differences are hard to