Still such an immersive world to step into, twenty years later, and I still love Lyra and Pan fiercely, though with the former it's hard to say why, as adult Lyra lacks so many of the qualities that made her loveable.

The glaring holes in the plot and the huge exposition dumps annoyed me, as did some of the more problematic aspects (the bad scary east with its terrorist 'men from the mountains') but it was satisfying reading the evils of the corporate neoliberal university invading the dreaming spires of Jordan College, as that's been the reality of universities since Northern Lights was published.

The theme of the human-daemon connection/separation remains as affecting as ever, and I've been stroking my wee dog Rowan more often that usual while reading. I don't know if there's been many psychoanalytic readings of His Dark Materials/The Book of Dust, but the retro quality of these books also goes quite well with the philosophical aspects, with the questions it's asking more resonant with the academic theory of the 90s and early 2000s rather than today.

It's fitting that it reminded me of my undergraduate years in lots of ways, and probably why the overwhelming pathos is of melancholy and dis-ease. The creeping sense of dread is augmented by today's political/social/ecological context as much as anything else - I read the chapter featuring a character's arrest by dubious authorities just after seeing the news of the guidelines for what external speakers now can't say in English schools. I had started this book because of I wanted escapism, but it felt more like dystopia than fantasy, and as a dear friend has written, 'your dystopian fiction won't save you now'.