BOOK BARN

#273: DUST.  In 1995, Philip Pullman published Northern Lights , the book known in America as The Golden Compass , the first volume in his now-acclaimed trilogy, His Dark   Materials .  The American title was a bloop: the original title for the trilogy was to be The Golden Compasses , a phrase from Paradise Lost , a reference in the poem to God’s creating a plotted, circular limit to the universe—a theme central to Pullman’s story.  Milton is all over Pullman’s books (Blake t

#272.  MORE ON SHAKESPEARE.  Shakespeare is a possession, in almost any sense you want to give the word.  For Brits, he is a national possession: a secondhand bookshop in Stratford I once visited had a large corner display of Shakespeare and a small sign that said proudly: “Local author.”  For theatre people especially, booksellers, professors of literature, he is a professional, a vocational possession.  Stephen Greenblatt has written of “the special delight that Shakespeare

#271: BLESSING THE TELLERS OF TALES.  Perhaps no contemporary writer has been more committed and persuasive—both in his own work and in his critical writing—about the power and necessity of telling stories than Philip Pullman, most famously the author of His Dark Materials . It was the common theme of his collection Dæmon Voices , with essays ranging from Kleist and Dickens and Milton and Tove Jansson and Arthur Ransome to more formal pieces on narrative and storytelling (as