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From the monthly archives:
March 2010
Philip Pullman is the author of His Dark Materials, the book I just finished reading. His latest book is titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Pullman, addressing an audience at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, was asked about whether his latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, was offensive. Here’s his reply:
“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.”
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I ordered an iPad (which shipped today) without having a clear idea of how we (Barb and I) would use it. Surf the web, check email, maybe read a book or two.
After watching the guided tours that went up on the Apple website today, I think I underestimated this little slab of magic. I was very impressed with the Keynote app. That’s the Apple version of PowerPoint. I can easily imagine whipping up a presentation while waiting for a flight.
Pages looked awfully good, too. I’d call it a word processor but it looks like a lot more on the iPad. I have Pages on all my Macs but rarely use it. I think I might on the iPad.
We won’t know until people get their hands on the iPad and start playing with it, but I think it’s going to become THE computer (or whatever we wind up calling it) for a lot of folks. If I had to guess, I’d say that 90% of the stuff that most folks doing on a laptop will be easier and more fun on the iPad.
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Just finished Northern Lights, the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. As we used to say back in the sixties, “Heavy.”
I’ve caught parts of The Golden Compass (the book’s North American title) on cable and wanted to see how the movie compared to the novel. Very well, it turns out. I’m eager to get on to Books 2 and 3.
I enjoyed most of the Harry Potter books –and it’s probably unfair to compare the two– but Pullman challenges readers in a way that Ms. Rowling never did.
Definitely on the short list for the next church bonfire.
UPDATE: Finished the third book today and I’m a little numb. I read somewhere that Pullman wrote the book for “young adults.” I’m not sure what that means… teenagers? Younger? Whatever, I wish I had read the book in my teens, although I’m not sure how much I would have understood. Maybe that’s the point.
I thought it was a terrific story. Life and Death; Sin and Redemption; Good and Evil; Witches and Angles. And a less-than-attractive view of religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Easy to see why they weren’t keen on a sequel to The Golden Compass.
If you learned everything you needed to know in Sunday School, you can skip this book but I found the book to be very spiritual and mostly uplifting. A couple of quotes:
“I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn’t.” pg 954
“We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.” pg 854
“If you wanted to divert a mighty river into a different course, and all you had was a single pebble, you could it as long as you put the pebble in the right place to send the first trickle of water that way instead of this.”
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