but I really can't agree that Lewis is a better writer in any artistic sense.

I think Lewis is more consistent. The nasty parts stick out because they are not the bulk of the books. Pullman fails in large swathes of the book. I agree that Pullman's best matches or exceeds Lewis's best. But Pullman is at his best much less.

Also in terms of religion vs. relgious institutions: I think Pullman thinks the premises of religion are both false and require a great deal of wilfull denial. Hence he sees the the problems of religious institutions as a pretty inevitable result of religious belief. Not that every religous person (or even most religious people) will do evil, but that religious institutions are inevitably corrupt.

but I now fail to understand why organized religion didn't join together for an ecumenical burning at the stake.

Well, they did successfully kill the movie.

I thought the movie being really boring and the book having a different audience than the oft-compared Narnia books killed it. Certainly I hated it, and I love the first two books without any explanatory parentheses.

I love Narnia, too.

I think Pullman is mostly against the misuse of religion in the first two books, but poses his thread a bit in the last one, which leaves me very headscratchy on a number of levels.

I think Pullman thinks the premises of religion are both false and require a great deal of wilfull denial.

But he ends up postulating a universe that works on equally supernatural and arbitrary rules as those espoused by the vilified religious institutions. That's where he lost me.

But he ends up postulating a universe that works on equally supernatural and arbitrary rules as those espoused by the vilified religious institutions.

Several levels to that. One is he is painting a picture of how appalling the actual existence of supernatural beings would be. Another layer is a picture of how distorted and corrupt religious institutions are even when representing actual supernatural beings. (The first layer weakens the second. If you build a world in which all the gods are devils then it does not prove much about the nature of temples for all the temples to be corrupt. )

Oh, I'm fine with all the gnostic allegory stuff, but when he notes that chance and evolution couldn't have produced the braided-rope wheeled creatures and reveals the truth about the universe that we can only know because he tells us (since no one can travel between worlds anymore), I don't know, it seems designed to stifle the imagination and stuff it nto a mallish box and what's the point of doing THAT with fantasy?

I had similar issues with Summerland.

Loved Golden Compass and Subtle Knife, and thought that Amber Spyglass fit into the trilogy about as neatly as one of those sub-sized replacement tires fits in with the set of three other proper tires. I was left scratching my head and wondering how I hadn't foreseen any of what happened in the book.

So I do not re-read that one.

Got a good laugh about everyone's prognostications about Successful Scarlett. I don't know why I have a soft spot for her still. I always thought she had a chance to grow out of her immature self-centeredness; that the journey from Atlanta where she ended up bringing Melly through childbirth and home to Tara alive proved her mettle. She could have just run off and escaped her responsibilities, you see. She stuck around in the crunch, so to High-School Katie, she was Really A Heroine.

So I sometimes still think about Scarlett O'Hara, and thus her story was Good Fiction for me because it was memorable.

As for unpleasant characters, I often find them funny on TV and unbearable in books. Perhaps because beholding them in print and my imagination means I spend more time with them than I do when it's series television.

Days of silence now? That's so weird. After all the tumbleweeds through this thread in the last few days, I'm sorry. I'll never mention GWTW ever again if the other readers would just come back. Purty please?

This happens in Literary sometimes. Nothing to do with GWTW.

I just finished The Zombie Survival Guide, which was good, but I just started World War Z, and it's already ten times better in the first ten pages.

World War Z was really fun