USA TODAY - Book Buzz

‘Compass’ on film:

Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, the best-selling fantasy novel, says he had no interest in writing the screenplay for the long-awaited movie: “I spent seven years getting the story to this point. Taking it apart and putting it back together again is not my idea of fun.” Pullman was at a New York lunch this week to promote the movie, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and to be released Dec. 7. The 1996 novel, published for children but widely praised by grown-ups, is set in a British world where everyone has a personal “daemon,” the manifestation of his or her soul in animal form. Pullman, who’s British, has seen an early cut of the film without its computer-generated effects and calls it “rich, strange and wonderful.”