That sound you can hear is the rusty gate of this blog creaking open. Is that a mixed metaphor? I don’t even know anymore. Where am I? Who are you? Who am I?

Just kidding, you guys. My brain is totally intact and I can construct sentences (well, we’ll see). I have also been reading books, contrary to what my silence here might indicate. I have been pretty busy, what with everything – and let’s be honest, no one’s life has been in danger due to my non-updates – but there’s been a development in my life that made me keen to come back here and get to documentin’.

Late last year I got an iPad 2. Since then, I’d estimate that I’ve had a conversation about it with 70% of the people I know. That’s a big percentage. And despite the fact that this is the first post in a series about said device, I’m not really an Extoller of the Pleasures of the Tablet or anything; people are just very interested in them and the future of the book and what have you. Usually other people ask me whether I have an e-reader yet and whether I like it, and why I chose the iPad over other e-readers, etc.

Briefly, I decided on the iPad because I wanted to be able to test all the major reading platforms. I wanted to be able to read on the Kindle, Kobo, Booki.sh and Google Books platforms, to see what they were like. I also wanted the best opportunity to get any book I wanted as an e-book, so I wanted to be able to access e-books in just about any format.

Also, it was an aesthetic thing. I don’t like the look of a lot of the ink readers, even though my initial wish was to get an ink technology reader. They’re just too plasticky and the screens are too small. And finally, I’ve been burnt by non-Apple computer products before. Samsung, I hate you. Sony, I do not like you (mostly, actually, due to this ad). Asus, I really just do not like you very much. My MacBook has lasted six years, which is longer than any other computer I have ever had. I love it, and I trust it. I did not buy the Steve Jobs biography, but I would buy his products.

I have the wi-fi model, not the 3G. I am almost superstitiously weird about not wanting to have internet access at all times. I don’t have a smartphone, either. I bought this tablet pretty much for reading only, so I won’t be commenting on the iPad qua secondary computer or life-organiser or anything like that. (Yes, I realise this is somewhat akin to, I don’t know, buying a ladder so I can sit on the third rung when I’m out of chairs, but I don’t mind.) It’ll pretty much be just about whether I liked reading the book in the X app or on the Y platform. Sorry if this bores you.

Since I acquired my new friend, about 50% of the books I’ve read have been e-books, which has surprised me. I suspect the figure would be higher still if I hadn’t been reading so many review copies that are print books. It’s been an interesting and net positive experience so far. I’m interested to see if my print/electronic book ratio rises much or steadies around the 50% mark.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since I’ve had it for a few months now, I’ll just do a quick rundown of the beginning of our beautiful relationship.

***

Zero hour: WOW! I love this box. I love Apple. Even with the gorillas and the … everything. I’m not proud of this. But it’s so shiny. I love it. I just want to get, like, ten iPads and rub them all together. They’re so nice. Look at it all pretty when I turn it on. Ooooooh.

Hour one: What do you mean I need to create a new account for every reading platform I want to use? What do you mean I need to come up with new passwords for all of them? What do you mean the passwords need to include upper case letters, lower case letters, numerals and punctuation marks. Are you kidding me? I can’t even remember my own name sometimes. This sucks. I hate this. Okay, my password is going to be Ih8uiPad:(.

Hour two: Okay, I have passwords. I have apps. I have fingers. I have a credit card. I want to buy a book. Kindle app, you get to go first. What do I want to read…oh, you can get so many free books! Pride and Prejudice! Who cares if I already own three copies? I guess I know how that happened because I’m going to download it onto my iPad right now, I’m going to have four copies, I’m so excited!!! Yayayayayayayayayayay!! Jane Austen is the best!!! I love her so much! Northanger Abbey! That’s the only one I haven’t read. Yayayayayayayayayayay!!! I’m going to read it tonight! I’m going to read it now! Yayayay! Downloading… this is so great. I’m going to get it straight away. What an ugly cover. Oh well, it’s not going on my shelf, who cares.

Hour three: Okay, all downloaded, I’m so excited, I’m going to read this book so bad. Wait…where is it? I just bought it at Amazon and it said it had been sent to my iPad, so where is it? Go back to Amazon and check what it says to do. Yep, I downloaded it. Should be available on my iPad. Back to the Kindle app. Not there. Where is it? This is so annoying. Where is it? Can you refresh this thing? What the hell. What the hell?? I hate this. This doesn’t happen with REAL books. WTF. Where is it. Go back to Amazon. Check what it says to do. Yes, I definitely downloaded it. I hate this iPad. Maybe if I turn it off. That always works. Okay, turn it off. Turn it on. Is it there? … I HATE IPADS.

What? You think I should reinstall the Kindle app? Maybe. Okay.

Hour four: Yayayayayayayay!!! I am going to read Northanger Abbey so bad. Oooooo, changing the fonts is fun. Ooooooo, look at all the ways you can change the page-turning visualisation. Oooooo. Oooo. I love this. I am going to read it in white text on black.

Hour three point five: Ow, my eyes. Change it back to the normal way.

Two days later: I love Jane Austen! I love romantic comedies! I hate Isabella Thorpe! You could just tell she was bad from the beginning! And her brother! I love my iPad! I love Henry Tilney! I love farms! I love my iPad!! I really love my iPad!!!!!

FIN

I was having a chat with some nice people the other day, and one of them said, ‘There is nothing so sad as a moribund blog’. I’m not quoting exactly, but that’s basically the gist of it. As he said this, my heart swelled beyond typical size and I thought bleakly of my poor little blog sitting here, all alone, by itself.

But I have been doing other things, if not blogging, and two of them can be read by you, if you so choose. I interviewed Sydney fashion label Song for the Mute for new fashion magazine Collection. Song for the Mute have just won the 2011 L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival Designer Award, against some stiff competition. Collection is pretty gorgeous – it’s a hardcover magazine printed on lovely stock, and every page is perforated at the spine, so you can tear out any page with impunity.

The other thing keeping me busy of late has, of course, been Kill Your Darlings. For the new issue, available for pre-order this week, I interviewed Geoff Dyer, famed writer of many stripes. Dyer is a wonderfully interesting writer and also a charming raconteur. If you’ve read any of his twelve books (the subjects range from photography to jazz to military history, and he’s also an acclaimed essayist and fiction writer), you’ll know what I mean.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy are three of my favourite books in the world. The books, if you haven’t read them, follow the adventures of a young girl called Lyra, who lives in a parallel world to ours, where humans’ souls exist outside their bodies and take animal forms. The sheer imagination that suffuses the novels is wondrous, and is underpinned by Pullman’s powers of characterisation; Lyra and her companion, Will, who’s from our world, are no mere products of ink on paper, but are as present as living, breathing flesh; as are their animal souls.

One of the most striking preoccupations of the books, and a common target for commentary since their publication, is the strength and corruption of its fictional church, called the Magisterium. In Northern Lights, the first of the books, the Magisterium has built a laboratory to perform dreadful experiments on children in the name of trying to eradicate Dust, which they believe is a physical manifestation of sin. The books are peppered with zealots of all kinds, from the lethal Mrs Coulter, a power-hungry associate of the Magisterium, to fanatics willing to flagellate themselves in advance punishment for crimes. Pullman’s fictional assailment upon wealthy, corporate churches was echoed in his personal statements, with his famous quote ‘My books are about killing God’ earning him plenty of ire from Christians all around the world.

His new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which I reviewed recently for The Big Issue, tackles similar ground in a more radical fashion. In fact, it might be seen as the thematic prequel to the His Dark Materials books: it sets up the structures and mythology that Pullman had Lyra tear down. Pullman reimagines the original Christian birth as a double: Mary is the mother of twins, Jesus and Christ. Christ is the early forerunner in the story, a child who performs miracles and often assists his more compulsive brother, Jesus, out of trouble. As the brothers age, the differences intensify – Jesus becomes a charismatic religious teacher devoted to God, who repels with disgust Christ’s attempts to persuade him to capitalise on his influence and assemble a structured church, ‘all answering to the authority of one supreme director’.

Christ is asked by a mysterious stranger to make a record of Jesus’ doings, and he does so – at first as accurately as he can, but then with some revisions and editing. So we learn that the stories we now know from the Bible were entirely different in the doing; we see the tension of myth and history. For instance, the paralysed man whom Jesus exhorts to take up his mat and walk was not cured, but ’so strengthened and inspired by the atmosphere Jesus had created that he found himself able to move’. And, at a wedding in Cana where the wine has run out, Jesus has a few words with a steward and more wine appears, but it’s not certain exactly how; it’s possible that Jesus has simply asked for more to be brought out.

There is a lot to admire in the book, but there are also disappointments. I have not read anything so beautiful this year as The Good Man Jesus’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, which is served well by Pullman’s easy yet arresting prose. His way with characterisation and dialogue (assisted, of course, by the source material) provides us with a Jesus who is resolute and lion-like in ferocity. But there’s close to no subtlety in Jesus’s diatribe in Gethsemane. In Mark’s gospel, this is a moment of enduring and bottomless faith. But in The Good Man Jesus, Jesus has lost his faith completely, and is using his last moments not for reconciliation but catharsis: ‘Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in our name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love.’ It’s rather too ‘The Church’s Worst Crimes throughout the Ages’, and not strongly foreshadowed in the book; as Rowan Williams said in his Guardian review, ‘nothing in the narrative has prepared us for this; the Jesus of earlier chapters has a robust conviction of the unconditional love of God’.

The Christian story is one that clearly has a powerful hold on Pullman. In fact, such is its power over him that my thoughts upon reading The Good Man Jesus were of a similar tenor to James Bradley’s conclusion in May 5th’s Australian Literary Review (though nowhere near as finely worded) that The Good Man Jesus ‘is a book so bound up in its argument with religion that it is … essentially a religious text, unable to transcend the terms of its creation’. The dilemma faced by Christ – how to represent Jesus’s story and ensure its longevity – is one that accepts the power and grace of that originary story. But while Pullman may have an argument with religion, he certainly doesn’t have anything against the power of story, the sole element of religion that emerges from the book unscathed.

Read the transcript of a conversation between Philip Pullman and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (whose intelligence and engagement with non-Christian viewpoints make me furious about being in the poisonous vicinity of George Pell), here.

We hear a lot about the death of language. Whether it’s the death of the author, the novel, the letter – every literary item imaginable has, it seems, been eulogised. Michael Quinion’s Gallimaufry is a delightful book that trawls through the obituaries of the many such fallen soldiers: words that have sailed off into the ether.

A word-nut will have lots of fun with this book. Quinion is an engaged guide, and uses a light writing style, which is a blessing when he navigates the linguistic and historical origins of the words he studies. The title word, gallimaufry, which now means a ‘hodgepodge’, comes from old French. It originally meant a stew or sauce, and it’s still used today, though perhaps only in very enlightened (or pretentious) corners of the English-speaking world. Quinion has divided his enquiry into five thematic parts. The first deals with food and drink, and is of course my favourite; the second with health and medicine; the third, entertainment and leisure; the fourth, transport and fashion; and the fifth, names, employment and communications. Those of you with refined palates will relish the knowledge that the word bottarga (or cured fish roe) – as we know it in Australia – came from the Arabic butarkha originally. There are lots of wonderful little slices through history like this that make you feel like you’re lifting up a magic curtain into the past.

Wonderfully, the thematic division of the book allows you to discover English-speaking habits and cultures that are long fallen by the wayside. Quinion fossicks around in the verbal dirt for things I now kind of regret finding out. Harry Potter fans will know that a bezoar is a ‘concretion of hair or vegetable fibre that forms naturally in the stomachs of ruminant animals’, used once upon a time as an antidote to poison. Men awaiting the barber’s attention used to enjoy the music of a cittern. Also, find out what Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts were about wearing a wig! However, I just couldn’t be enthralled by discovering that the zingerilla and the bransle were fancy lady-and-gentleman dances. Perhaps my fellow Jane Austen readers would beg to disagree.

Despite the subject matter of Gallimaufry being predominantly old and now obscure words, Quinion is certainly no obscurant. There are lots of treasures to be had here for readers of British historical fiction, and even those who once pondered why the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Dolly Varden’ cake was termed as such. (The Dolly Varden was a rakishly side-slung hat. Though what connection a hat has to a cake with a doll stuck in it, I’ll never have the capacity to fathom.) If you like odd language trivia and showing off your vocabularistic prowess, you will like this book, as it will enable you to say things like: ‘Did you know that “fig” used to mean “banana” in the West Indies at one stage?’ NO, I DIDN’T. And now I do.

NB. I work at Oxford University Press.

Something to listen to, this time: the review of Evie Wyld’s After the Fire, A Still Small Voice I did for Radio National’s The Book Show. I get some tonal variation in my voice after the first thirty seconds; just be patient. Wyld won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for this, her first novel, which was also easily one my favourite things I’ve read this year. Listen to the rest of the show, as well: Reif Larsen discusses the books he likes to collect, Andrea Goldsmith talks about grief and poetry, and Kevin Rudd’s summer reading list is revealed.

‘I was wondering,’ said Lady Tamplin, again drawing her artistically pencilled brows together, ‘whether–oh, good morning, Chubby darling: are you going to play tennis? How nice!’

Chubby, thus addressed, smiled kindly at her, remarked perfunctorily, ‘How topping you look in that peach-coloured thing,’ and drifted past them and down the steps.