Lucas Stoffel

The Amber Spyglass is the book where Philip Pullman finished building his cathedral and then knocked it down. This is a children's novel about the death of God, the liberation of the dead, the nature of consciousness, and two children who fall in love and must be separated forever. It should collapse under the weight of its own ambition. It doesn't. It soars.

The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, and everything changes. Where The Golden Compass was Lyra's book — fierce, adventurous, set in a single extraordinary world — The Subtle Knife is about the spaces between worlds, and the boy who can cut through them. Book Review.

Philip Pullman wrote a children's book where the villains are the Church, the weapon is truth, and the hero is an eleven-year-old girl who lies better than anyone in literature. The Golden Compass is the most subversive, most ambitious, and most beautifully written fantasy novel for young readers ever published, and I will fight about this.

"The Tao of Pooh" Book Review: Benjamin Hoff did something that should be impossible: he explained Taoism using Winnie-the-Pooh, and it actually works. Not as a gimmick. Not as a cute introduction you'd outgrow. It works as genuine philosophy, and it works because Pooh already understood everything Lao-tzu was trying to say.

I'm going to review Atlas Shrugged as a novel, not as a philosophy textbook, because that's what it is — a novel — and it deserves to be engaged with on those terms even if the philosophy has consumed every conversation about it for sixty years. Book Review.