Day Eight

Day 08 – Most overrated book

Oh dear, this will put the cat amongt the pigeons, let me say at the outset I don't really believe in the term overrated (or underrated I guess) .. it's just a question of personal taste. If I don't like a book it doesn't mean it's overrated if a million other people love it, it just means it wasn't for me.

So the book that wasn't for me but was for a lot of other people is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (which is often classed as one book on the lists) ... that's not to say that I hated all three of them, I just got steadily more disappointed and disillusioned with them. I thought they had some great ideas (loved the depiction of the dæmon's and the armoured polar bears) and I quite enjoyed the first book The Golden Compass .. or Northern Lights as we say this side of the pond. I didn't enjoy the other two much, I don't know what it was, some of the ideas seemed re-hashed and hackneyed. The main problem was that I didn't care enough about Lyra or Will ... I guess, having at the time lately read Harry Potter, I was comparing them to Harry, Ron and Hermione .. you feel you know their characters inside out but Lyra and especially Will felt too one-dimensional to me.