Some of us, who loved The Hobbit and Harry Potter, did not care even for the first, let alone the controversial third, of the Pullman series.

I had two problems with it: first, the politics and society of the alternate world seemed less complex and more simplistic than the primary world, and thus lacked credibility; second, the daemons were really, really annoying. Not as annoying as Jar-Jar Binks, perhaps, but even more inescapable.

Your take may differ, but if I hadn't read this book I'd have been quite eager to try it after reading this post, and man would I ever have been annoyed afterwards.