Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Secret Commonwealth Broods and Meanders and Dabbles in Casual White Supremacy

The Secret Commonwealth by Phillip Pullman

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**Spoilers for His Dark Materials trilogy and The Book of Dust trilogy below** A lot happens in this book, and nothing happens. Which was predictable. The second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy is also a filler, but at least then they get the stupid knife. A Secret Commonwealth feels like a million pages of setting up, introducing us to characters that will probably be important, moving them to where the next war is going to break, explaining their motivations. It’s basically a very […]

I can see the future, it’s a real dark place

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

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Oh, how I loved the first book in this trilogy (La Belle Sauvage)! It was one of my favorite books of 2018, and I had such high hopes for The Secret Commonwealth. Maybe, had my expectations been a little lower, I would have enjoyed this more. Sadly, The Secret Commonwealth ended up being rather disappointing. The Secret Commonwealth starts with Lyra Silvertongue, now in her early 20s, as a student St. Sophia’s College in Oxford. We also learn in the first part of the book […]

“You’re in a world full of color and you want to see it in black and white.”

The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust, #2) by Philip Pullman

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Firstly, this was very compelling. I haven’t spent really any time wondering what happened to Lyra since we last left her, if I’m being honest (I liked that nebulous hopefulness at the end of Amber Spyglass that let you assume she would do the work of building the Republic of Heaven on earth, that she would eventually find love that would let her move on from Will, etc.). But as soon as she and Pan appeared on the page, I realized that I had missed them and […]



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