The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman (on CD)

If you haven't read this series, and if you like fantasy that makes you think hard, you should pick up His Dark Materials. This is volume one, which I read several years ago. The recording I listened to--from Listening Library--is a 'production.' In other words, it isn't just one person telling the story and reading all the characters' parts; there is a full cast of voices portraying the characters. The author himself narrates.

It's quite a wonderful experience to listen to it from an aesthetic point of view, but the story itself is complex, bewitching and almost-but-not-at-all familiar. In this alternate universe from our own, Lyra lives at Jordan College in Oxford, a sort of wild child being raised by the scholars and servants while her Uncle Asriel is off exploring and doing 'philosophical' work. We'd call it scientific investigation. The Church runs the Western World, and there are no airplanes, just airships (blimps), and very few cars. It's sort of a Victorian society brought forward into the mid-1940s but actually existing at the same time as ours. Women are absolute second-class citizens by and large.

There are talking polar bears with opposable thumbs, witches who fly on cloud-pine, and gyptians (not a typo) who run the canals of England. But the most astouding part of this world is that every human being has a 'demon,' an animal that is part of its self. Without their demon people die, or become zombies. And yet, the Church is involved in trying to separate demons and children because they are trying to control the amount of Dust that attaches to humans at puberty. Dust is a mysterious 'elemental particle' that seems to read minds, and clusters about adults (and is unseen). It seems to be, in our terms, a combination of Original Sin and the more general sense of soul. All the adults fear it. Lyra decides it's not to fear, but to embrace and that sets up the second book in the series.

A wonderful, thinking children's series, much deeper and more complex than the Harry Potter books, with layer upon layer of meaning on each page.