The Golden Compass

The world and the premise in this one has so much potential, but I just felt like the pacing was a bit too slow, and I found things really draggy by the middle. It also felt like an adult's story strongly dressed up as a children's book, because it dealt with very, very heavy topics and had some pretty violent scenes involving (anthropomorphic) animals fighting each other to the death. But yet the author used the guise of a children's book so he could do expositions and info dumps that would be excusable for children's stories but inexcusable for adults. Honestly a shame because I really liked the premise and the world and want to know more about the concepts introduced in this book, but I'm still on the fence whether I want to read the rest of the series.