(OT) NYT Book Review on Philip Pullman

[Ebony]

Thought some might be interested in this, per our recent discussion 
of the trilogy here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17000

I love this quote especially--

"Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted: by a sense 
of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, 
Arcadia spoilt, the debased or diminished stature of modern 
humankind; by a sense that the world, to borrow a term from John 
Clute, the Canadian-born British critic of fantasy and science 
fiction, has "thinned." This sense of thinning—of there having passed 
a Golden Age, a Dreamtime, when animals spoke, magic worked, children 
honored their parents, and fish leapt filleted into the skillet—has 
haunted the telling of stories from the beginning. The words 'Once 
upon a time' are in part a kind of magic formula for invoking the 
ache of this primordial nostalgia."

--Ebony