The Golden Compass

Watching this fairly awesome looking trailer inspired me to download and listen to the audio version of the book it's based on, which is called "His Dark Materials, Book One: The Golden Compass" (also known as "Northern Lights" in its native England) by Phillip Pullman. It's really great, and now I absolutely can't wait for the movie version.

The story revolves around a young girl named Lyra Belacqua who lives in a world in which every human is born with a sort of "spirit animal" called a daemon. The daemon is akin to a soul and takes the form of a physical talking animal that accompany their human at all times. It is taboo to touch someone else's daemon and separation of a human from his/her daemon causing unbearable physical and emotional pain on the part of both human and daemon, and often results in death. Lyra finds out about an organization that is kidnapping children and forcibly removing them from their daemons because they believe that "impure" thoughts and desires are caused by the daemons. Battles ensue, people get killed, and there are talking polar bears that wear armor.

This is crazy shit but somehow it all works, and it's real good. This is a trilogy, so I've still got two more books, and I can't wait.