Saturday Snippet: All Saint's Day

All Saints' Day, also known as All Hallows, Day of All the Saints, Solemnity of All Saints, or Feast of All Saints is a solemnity celebrated on 1 November by the Roman Catholic Church of Latin rite and various Protestant denominations, and on the first Sunday after Pentecost in Eastern Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, in honour of all the saints, known and unknown. The liturgical celebration begins at Vespers on the evening of 31 October and ends at the close of 1 November. It is thus the day before All Souls' Day.

In Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Catholic parts of Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia and Sweden, the tradition is to light candles and visit the graves of deceased relatives.

*image and quotes not mine

Tome Thursday: The Dwarves

Hello everyone!

I'm back into the realm of fantasy or science fiction, depending how you look at it right now, although I have to admit that this book is pretty much fantasy when it all boils down to it. Epic fantasy, maybe? That, too, but I wouldn't be so sure according to the reviews I've seen on Amazon or Goodreads.

Not that I usually care about those.

To me, the total number of good reviews doesn't say whether or not the book is good or bad. It just tells me that I may find it to be different than what the other readers thought about it. I've seen this happen with movies more often than books, since IMDB tends to have ratings that really do fool people. If you judge a movie just by the rating, you can miss out on a lot of great ones because the only ones who actually review are the people who disliked it. Me, I try to be objective.

But back to books.

Markus Heitz is a German author, and I first saw his books on accident while browsing in the store one day. They attracted me because of the fact that they were, apparently, about Dwarves only. So I eventually decided, what the heck, let's try it!

Talkie Tuesday: Jupiter Ascending

"I am NOT your mother."

Hello everyone!

I'm once again back with a movie review from my time spent at the seaside, so it's absolutely been a couple of months since I've seen this, but luckily, I have my trusty little notebook with its productive sheep on the front cover to keep me appraised of everything I thought about then! 

Or well, if not that, then at least I've noted down what, exactly, was going on haha.

To be perfectly honest, when I first saw something for this movie, I wasn't sure I'd see it, because I just didn't think I'd have the time. But the ginormous character posters in our cinema made me at least WANT to do it, so when summer holidays rolled around I figured, why not? I was going for a lot of fantasy and biographic dramas at that time so I thought I needed something else to spice things up for myself, and some science fiction thrown in the mix sounded like just the thing.

If I told you that the movie is about intergalactic travel, planets, and royalty, what would your answer be?

Hopefully not Star Wars.

I'm talking about Jupiter Ascending.

Saturday Snippet: Apple Pie

Hello everyone!

So alright, I will admit - like I've said a while ago, me and baking or me and cooking don't really go together. BUT I have a lot of time when I'm at home (or I shovel time aside, sometimes you just have to be violent) to experiment a little bit.

Browsing through random stuff in the kitchen, I stumbled over an old notebook of my mother's, which used to be tagged with blood red letters saying DO NOT TOUCH, MOVE AWAY SLOWLY BEFORE SOMETHING GOES BOOM.

Haha that's just the way you see it as a kid!

But it was a book of her old recipes, and I found the one for apple pie that my maternal grandmother used to make (and we all LOVED to devour). Here it is below!

Tome Thursday: The Virgin's Daughter

Hello everyone!

This week, I actually had quite a pick when I was choosing a book to write about in the review section, because at this point, I've amassed SO many notes that my poor notebook is basically falling apart from the middle out.

But it's good, because it means I don't have to scramble as much as I did in the beginning!

And I will confess, I'm under the Tudor influence at the moment, as you can probably tell by looking to the right of this blog to my Goodreads currently reading bookshelf. My friend Maegan told me about the fictional Autobiography of Henry VIII she had read, and I thought to myself, sure, why not, so I'm currently munching my way through it. According to my Kobo e-reader, I'm 60% through. The plan: finish it this weekend.

In the meantime, however, I checked to see whether or not I wrote down some notes about another Tudor-esque book I read a while back, during summer, and I did!

Allow me to start with my review of Laura Andersen's The Virgin's Daughter.

Talkie Tuesday: The Imitation Game

"We're going to break an unbreakable Nazi code and win the war."

Hello everyone!

So last week, I talked about The Theory of Everything, because I seemed to have known, instinctively, that the particular biopic wouldn't hold a candle to the one I'm talking about in this blog post. 

Don't get me wrong.

I admire Eddie Redmayne for what he did with the role he was given and the Oscar was absolutely deserving. But I've been a Benedict Cumberbatch fan for quite some time now I think; I definitely consider myself part of the CumberCollective!

And so when the first teaser image of The Imitation Game was released, I practically jumped around pumping the air with my fists in glee. Because, not only was it Cumberbatch, BUT it was about a topic I'm hugely interested in despite the political debates it can spawn. AND on top of it all, it's about the Enigma!

Saturday Snippet: Bookshelf Tour, part 4

Hello everyone!

To the relief of some ( = P ) this will be the last bookshelf tour post for a while, even though this really is only the first of many shelves I have going along one whole wall in my room. To be honest though, I might actually do a DVD tour at some other point because I seem to have a rather large number of those, too ...

You get the idea.