I'm rereading this series after a break of some years and I love it just as much now as I did then. It's so much better than that crappy film adaptation; I don't know what they were thinking, gutting the themes of the books as they did. The focus on free will is absolutely fundamental to the text, and frankly you'd have to be as thick as pig shit not to recognise that.

But anyway (she says, trying to avoid ranting on irrelevancies), Northern Lights is clever and thoughtful and stuffed with wonderful characters. Those characters really are excellent. The antagonists are convincingly evil and yet are more than cut outs, while the protagonists and supporting cast are just as believable. I've a giant soft spot for Iorek the armoured bear, but really the stand out character here is Lyra. She's a good kid but not a nice one; I love that she's rough around the edges and her first instinct is always to lie and be distrustful. She's always reminded me a bit of Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, another intermittently horrible little girl. I enjoy characters who are a bit horrible sometimes - especially when they're kids - because it does make them seem a bit more real that way. Lyra feels unmistakeably real to me, and always has done. Because of that, her relationship with her daemon is likewise extremely convincing, and the part of the story where they were being forcibly separated never fails to raise a genuine shudder of revulsion.