The movie of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, book one of His Dark Materials trilogy, will be coming to theaters in December 2007. If you haven't read these books, check them out of our library now. (They are in the Class03 section near the Senior Reading Room.) And definitely check out this movie web site to learn a little about the books and the upcoming movie.
The three books -- The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass -- are set in a fully-realized parallal world much like our own, except that humans have their souls expressed on the outside of their body, as daemons (a talking animal spirit that remains with their human for their entire life). In The Golden Compass, Lyra, the young heroine, and her daemon Pantalaimon discovers that the children disappearing from Oxford (where she's grown up) are being used for a disturbing scientific experiment designed to protect them from a mysterious substance known only as Dust. Blending science, theology, and magic, these three books are suspenseful, inventive, sometimes heart-breaking, always absorbing. You can read them for fun or, as I did, read Milton's Paradise Lost at the same time to gain an even deeper understanding -- the books allegorically follow this classic story of the war between heaven and hell that portrayed Satan as a sympathetic anti-hero and God as a cold and passionless ruler.
I'm curious to see what the movie industry will make of one of my favorite books (favorite series, also, if they decide to make all three) and hope they do as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy and not as poorly as the first two Harry Potters.