The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust #2)

by Philip Pullman

There was an MP called Bernard Crombie leading the fight against it, but he was killed recently, supposedly in a road accident.”

Does he want me to finish and get my degree, or—or what?

He cmay have been placating you

Asta stayed to look after you.” “You separated?” Lyra said. “And you killed him?”

Huh i forgpt they actually separated at that bit

then she saw another pattern too: the man Will had killed had been a member of the secret service of his country.

So he's Will 2.0? wut

“And there’s a city with an Arabic name…a ruined city. Inhabited by dæmons without people.”

I guess their people are all in the rose fortress thing

though it seemed to Malcolm something other than that, something wilder.

Pov skew

Lyra was quite calm and in fact seemed quietly satisfied about something.

Ooo is she acting more like a Lyra who can scheme???

And now she was smiling. For the first time for days, her eyes were free of shadows.

The folder was labeled in Lyra’s hand. Malcolm supposed that she’d taken her own papers out and put the dead man’s in,

Doing a bit of purloined letter - i like

She picked up a cushion and held it close with both arms around it, and Malcolm thought: Why isn’t she holding her dæmon like that?

Lyra and Pantalaimon didn’t like each other.

How stubborn she was he had more cause to know than most, but he wondered how many others had seen the loneliness in her expression when she wasn’t guarding it. “And

Gahh too much telling

It was Simon Talbot’s The Constant Deceiver. “Yes,” she said. “I’m not sure about it.”

Later that night they’d be in Hannah’s

You could split them btw two locations

What I don’t understand is why I never knew about this. I mean, I wouldn’t remember anyway, but why didn’t anyone tell me?”

Alice wasn’t a great one for education, but sharp as a tack, very bright, very quick.

Uhh

he was good at recounting events, giving each its due weight, putting them in the most effective order.

Lol why are we talking him up

“People have been talking for months now about a new way of reading the alethiometer.

They’ve got a young man there who’s brilliantly gifted.

She was frightened of something, and frightened separately of betraying the fact to him, a stranger.

The other is that battered book in the red cover. It’s an epic poem in the Tajik language called Jahan and Rukhsana. It’s about two lovers who search for a rose garden.

the bare stems of the shrubs, and where two young men were doing something horticultural near the glasshouses.

Lool

“But the policeman wasn’t acting officially, Mal, come on. The one Pan saw is corrupt. The police need to know what happened, and know about him.”

ACAB

That central question wouldn’t go away. He came back to it helplessly. He was conscious of his own ox-like clumsiness. He was conscious of all kinds of contrasts—his maturity and her youth,

Ok then this a love interest for Lyra???? Ewwww he knew her as a baby

At that time, when they were teacher and pupil, anything like that was so wrong, his mind shut it out before it had even fully formed.

theory aboit why she didnt like himk

the one exception, the difference went the other way.

I dunno malcolm and alice seem way more viable as a couple

she was in such danger and difficulty at the moment that bothering her with his own feelings would be unforgivable.

He, Malcolm Polstead, aged thirty-one, was in love with her. It was impossible to think th...

Do you even know her?

“But you’d expect them to be more affected, seeing as they were older. She was just a baby.

Thats not how adverse childhood experiences work

but Lyra had been experimenting with the new method of reading the alethiometer.

Why does everything cool keep happening off screen

she’d always need the books in which generations of scholars had set down their discoveries about the symbols and the links between them.

Ok who made the first one? They must have chosen what symbols to use. Didnt that person make a book?

So the new style of alethiometric technique had come as a welcome distraction.

This feels more organic to her character than her fascination with the philosophy books

You’re saying I haven’t got any imagination?” “You’re trying to live without it, that’s what I’m saying. It’s those books again.

I just don’t know what you’re talking about.

I think he's saying you have no imagination because you're too materialistic?

If she had, she might have supposed that that aspect of her self resided more in Pan, because she was practical, matter-of-fact, down-to-earth….But

She had no idea it would hurt so much to be told she had no imagination.

Lol

Why do you hate me so much? Why do I hate you? Why can’t we stand being with each other?”

Ooooo ask that

The classical method required a careful, watchful, but relaxed state of mind,

The reader had to abandon control and enter a state of passive vision where nothing was fixed and everything was equally possible.

Is that different

there’s nothing firm—no perspective…,”

Through it all she drifted, intentionless, free from any human feeling.

Through the doorway she saw a book-lined room where a young man was holding an alethiometer, and it was— “Will!” she said aloud.

he knew her to be the girl his employer Marcel Delamare wanted so badly for some reason, the girl who had his own father’s alethiometer, and she knew him to be the inventor of the new method.

Lyra had first encountered Sebastian Makepeace a few years before, in a strange little episode involving a witch and her dæmon.

Lyras oxford throwback

he knew about the power the witches had.

Isnt that common knowledge?

the list of names of people and their dæmons, and their addresses,

Each name and address was written in a different hand.

People wrote themselves in?

why haven’t you told Lyra about this?” “I…It just never seemed to be the right time.”

You keep saying that so i call bs. You dont want her to know about what you think the list means

“You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.

“It would mean those who live beyond Chorasmia, which is to say, the region to the east of the Caspian Sea.