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I enjoyed the books a lot, although I thought the third one was rather depressing at the end. But your mileage may vary; and Stevo's comment surprised me because I think of those books as relatively short.

I ran across these books at Borders last night. And Jadagul is right -- they are of moderate length at best, or can even be considered short, because their font size is huge compared to most of the stuff I've been reading lately. I therefore concluded that when Tim Cavanaugh expressed a lack of enthusiams for having to plow through a lot of pages, he meant the trilogy as a whole.

I haven't read them, and before this thread, the only comments I'd heard about it were glowing raves from the angry breed of atheists and "yeah, we get it, you hate Christianity," from folks I thought of as sensible theists.

So, not as bad as that?

Well, the third book in particular was a bit thick on the "religion and the Catholic Church are evil" bit. AT some point I wanted to say, "Hey, dude, we get it. You don't like the Pope. Calm the hell down." But it's a fun series (until the end of the third book, which has a sad-ish ending). And well-written--enough so to leave me in tears at the end.

But then, I was 16 or so, and tended to do that pretty easily :)

I've read the first book of the trilogy but am holding off on parts 2 & 3 . More accurately, I read the first book to my daughter - its a bit much for a 7 year old, so nix 2 & 3 for a while. Not being a fantasy fiction person, it's not something i would have come by on my own - found it in a list of fiction for children - and having read it can't say i'm particularly enthused. Pullman's innovation is that the Fantasy tropes are backed by SF style plausibility thats far more reasonable than "midichlorians in the bloodstream". The whole thing occurs in a counterfactual parallel Eurpoe where there was no refromation, the Catholic Church is dominant etc - as others have mentioned, the book is explicitly anti-clerical. That's another reason for not reading 2 & 3 - i don't mind the God & Catholic bashing, but imagine explaining it to a 7 year old.
So it might be fun if you are into fantasy.

I could never really get into His Dark Materials. I don't know what it was, exactly. It wasn't the anti-religious (or anti-clerical, or whatever) slant, because that doesn't start until later, and I only got through the first book. The writing didn't do anything for me, and the plotting seemed rather dull and hackneyed, IIRC. For whatever reason, I never even tried to read the second book, although the series came highly recommended. I might try again, and see if it was just my mood at the moment. I did that with Wizard's First Rule, which was better than I remembered, but still pretty crappy. And that's with an author who's an objectivist!

I've heard in general that the books become less good as one gets through them. Then again, I thought the same of LOTR.

I can't see how they could be construed as long.

I read the series. They do get less good as you go on. Slowly, as things get explained, the coherence of the themes dissolve. It tries to explain too much, which ultimately makes it hard to get through. The plot is a victim of the author's increasing fascination with his own genius.

Kind of like a Tad Williams jaunt.