Something happens when I buy books that I’ve been looking forward to reading but have been holding off on buying for whatever reason — a TBR pile growing dangerously long, an awareness that once I fall down the rabbit hole of a truly absorbing book I tend to walk around the real world with a glazed look in my eyes as if part of me isn’t there (which, in actual fact, it isn’t) — in any case, the same thing always happens: I put off reading it.

If it’s a physical book I’ll take it down from my shelves once in a while and turn it over in my hands, running my fingers over the cover, peeping in at the typeface, making mental notes on the book design. If it’s an e-book, I’ll add it to my ‘Currently Reading’ collection, where it will call softly and persistently to me while I’m either re-reading an old favorite or making my way through the many anthologies of short stories I have acquired, which, I have found, do not have the same rabbit hole effect on me and thus are more conducive to actual real life functioning.

So when I bought Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (in one volume! the weight of this book is giving me nice arm musculature!), I knew that real life for me would be over as soon as I started reading it. So I held off. And held off. And held off. Until I couldn’t take it anymore and took it down from the shelf, staggering under the weight of its thousand over pages, and settled down to read this book which, because it is unavailable in Kindle form and I have been living in China, I have been essentially waiting to read for three years.

Extremely bad timing, for a variety of reasons. My boyfriend was visiting, we were going to Sri Lanka, grad school arrangements had to be made, a two-and-a-half-month Europe trip had to be planned and, as of the writing of this post, the Seven Seas shipping company is still holding two boxes of my worldly possessions hostage in their warehouse.

But all of these real life concerns pale in comparison to Lyra Belacqua and her journey to the North in search of missing children, a substance called Dust and her scary, powerful and utterly sexy (to me, not to her, because ew)  father, Lord Asriel. I’ve only read the first two books in the trilogy, The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, because I had to take a big fat break in between (see: list of reasons above) but I have a couple of days free until I leave to Australia on a family trip so I’m planning great luscious read fests in between afternoon naps.

Life is good, y’all.