Hello All

[Aileth]

Hi there!

My name here is Aileth and like it says by my introduction here, I'm a newbie in the forum.

I came here through Mark Reads and I plan to stay for a long while. I started with HDM the year Northern Lights came out, or perhaps the next one depending on the month. If you've read the books it means you're fairly good readers so you may have experienced something like this. Have you ever had the feeling of a book calling you even if you keep ignoring it? That was Northern Lights for me. For months, I saw the book everywhere I went, calling me, until I decided it must mean something so I bought it. It was like Dust was actually calling me to read it and with good reason.

When I finished it (2 or 3 days?) my mom took it up, and then my sister. You can imagine an eager child (well, not child as the first book came out when I was 16, but you get the idea) going every month to bookstores to ask when the next book was coming out for at least 2 years before The Subtle Knife came out and how I came to know every bookstore clerk and they came to know me and answer my question the moment I stepped into the store. Of course, this second book was almost ripped from my hands by my mother when I got it.

The truly difficult time was when the third book, The Amber Spyglass, was supposed to come out. Three years passed without a word, then four years. Finally, I got tired of waiting and went to the internet to see if it had been published or not. To my surprise, the book had been published three years before and never made it to print in my language; it took five years for that to be accomplished. Of course, I didn't wait that long. I ordered the entire trilogy on my own way before I even knew that it'd come to my country eventually (I got it more than a year before it came), plunged into it from the beginning and finished everything in less than a week.

That's the story of how I came into the books. As for why I love them is merely this: the ideas given in them are ones I can share in my experience with religious, moral and ideological thinking and action. If you read it as a work of fictional ideas, it's an example of the mismanagement of a system. I see no threat of the idea of a creator, only the idea of people fighting against someone controlling your ideas.

For those who put up with my ramblings so far, thank you. I hope I didn't bore many of you. See you at the threads!

[bee]

Hello! Welcome! I think when I started reading these books was right around the time when TAS came out, so I never had that wait. I can't imagine having to wait between reading! Ahhh!

Also, you mentioned the books weren't in your language. What is your (first?) language? Where are you from?

[Aileth]

Also, you mentioned the books weren't in your language. What is your (first?) language? Where are you from?

I missed that part. I'm from Argentina, so my first language is Spanish. Back when I was in high school, I didn't think I could read in English fluently. Circumstances proved me wrong By the time TSK came out, I was reading regularly in English but didn't have access to much material so it didn't matter. With the years, I acquired more and more and now I've got plenty of books, many bookcases of them.

My mother and sister don't have my gift, so they had to wait even more years than me to read the last book; they had to wait for it to be printed in Spanish, which happened in 2005. I gave it to my mom for her birthday. I think my sister has it and won't give it to my mom, she's afraid she'll break it. This is why: when my mom read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, she bent the book double by the spine, it being a paperback copy but still the size of a square box, you can imagine what happened. Since then, my sister doesn't allow the big books near my mom's hands in case she breaks another one.