It struck me as being more actively Gnostic than anti-Catholic.

I'm not Catholic, and I found the third book offensive.

Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith.

The Authority is explicitly identified as being "God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty." And then there's an ex-nun whose view of the church is fairly pivotal. I didn't see the books so much as anti-Catholic as anti-religion-in-general, but a) I'm not Catholic, and b) that's basically why I was reading them.

Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith.

Well, no, but:

'I hope the wretched Catholic church will vanish entirely' >[link]

"I've been surprised by how little criticism I've got. Harry Potter's been taking all the flak... Meanwhile, I've been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God". >[link]

It's not like he's shy about views on the matter. I mean blah blah intentional fallacy all you want - enough people agree with the author in this case that I think arguing that the books are not anti-religion/anti-God/anti-Church is a difficult case to make at best.

(Personally I couldn't make it through even the first book because psychic and/or talking animals give me fantasy hives. And since I was never a fan of Narnia in the first place, I never really felt the need to take it down a peg by reading the atheist version.)

---

I love talking animals and daemons are some of my favorite.

Wow, i hadn't seen that first interview before, Jess.

Obviously many of us get different things out of reading the same books :) Love the beauty and variety of interpretation.

I need more themes for my monthly classic book salon. So far, we've done quests, eponymous heroines, russian authors, and classic horror. Next up is "Water, Water, Everywhere" for which I am reading Two Years Before the Mast.

I've gone through various Top 100 lists and 1001 Books to Read Before You Die and have produced the following themes: "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew," "Books and the Bookish," "Religious Characters and Settings," "Colonialism and Independence," California Dreaming," and "War, What Is It Good For?". Lists to follow.

I'm looking to add any classics (or contemporary books on the literary side) that fit these themes. The book lists are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give people ideas for what they might read, so that they can vote on topics.

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (daily life in 19th-century England)
Jane Austen: Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
Anne Brontë: Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre, Shirley
Charles Dickens: Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities
Maria Edgeworth: The Absentee, Castle Rackrent
George Eliot: Middlemarch, Silas Marner
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford, Mary Barton, North and South
William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Anthony Trollope: The Barchester Chronicles (especially Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset), Phineas Finn, The Way We Live Now

Books and the Bookish
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai Sijie)
Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand)
The Glass Bead Game (Herman Hesse)
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino)
London Fields (Martin Amis)
Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)
Mister Pip (Lloyd Jones)
On Beauty (Zadie Smith)
Possession (A.S. Byatt)
Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)
Under the Net (Iris Murdoch)
Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)

War, What Is It Good For?
All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
Atonement (Ian McEwan)
The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal)
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The Iliad (Homer)
The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
Regeneration trilogy (Pat Barker)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
Suite Française (Irène Némirovsky)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)