Party time ahead!

[wiseheart]

Well, yes, dear folks, it's this time of the year again. The big, one-week virtual party from today to the 9th of October starts here. Come on in, be welcome, make yourself comfortable, and post a comment. May we have many collapsed threads again!

Last year we had 559 comments on 4 pages, which is an impressive record to break. But I have an excellent apple pie in the oven, and offer a virtual slice to every party guest.

Let's party!

Addition: someone asked for the apple pie recipe. Here it is, behind the cut.


400 gr wheat flour
200 gr butter or margarine
200 gr sugar
1/10 litre sour cream
1 pinch of salt
ground peel of 1/lemon
2 gr baking soda

For the filling:
2 kg apples
sugar,cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla and ground lemon peel as you like

One eggyolk for painting the top.

How to make it?
1) Make a dough from abovementioned ingredients.
2) Cut it in two equal pieces. Roll out one piece, lay it into a baking tin (baking paper under it is helpful).
3) Spread some dried bread crubms all over it.
4) Peel and plane (slice???) the apples, press out the juice with your hands (it shouldn't be too dry, though) and mix them with the spices.
5) Spread the apples over the dough.
6) Roll out the other half of the dough. Cover the apples with it.
7) Paint the top with eggyolk and bake it in a pre-heated oven, on 200°C for twenty minutes.
8) Cut it when it's cooled down.

Sorry, but I had to use the metric system. My brain doesn't work in cups and pounds and that stuff. I hope you can still figure out how much you need from the ingredients.



Addition: I also wish to gift upon my dear party guests a birthday-present, Hobbit-style: Chapter 03 - Puer Natus Est Nobis of my Cadfael fic "Sparrows" has just been posted to hiddenrealms and to FF.Net. Enjoy!

And the end results are: 735 comments on 6 pages! It's more than I could have dreamed of, and I thank you - all of you - who contributed to this record. It will be a hard one to break next year indeed, but I hope you'll be back. :)

Thanks again, I had a fantastic time and met great new people - it was fun!

Comments

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I voted for The Lord of the Rings in the BBC Big Read search for our favourite book. In this setting I will agree it is overly obvious, though.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Sometimes being obvious isn't such a bad thing, though.
One of my deepest regrets is that the Professor never found the time to write the entire Tuor cycle, with Gondolin and stuff. What little is there in the Unfinished Tales is simply amazing - and then it just stops, and I could cry in frustration.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see a version of that like the recent Children of Hurin.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me, too. Actually, I'd prefer it to the Children of Húrin, since I absolutely detest Túrin. Not a popular thing to state, I know, but it's the truth.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Túrin's story got me when I was an angsty teenager. I do love the story, but boy it's depressing. And we were saying that Le Guin was the depressing one!

Túrin melodrama

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Well, my half-successful attempts to dig myself through the Sil were around the age of 30 or so, and I always found the whole lTúrin stuff too much melodrama for my taste. And too close to the Rheingold saga. Some parts of it almost sound like bad fanfic.

*ducks from flying rotten potatoes*

So sorry, but the Sil sometimes brings the worst out of me. I like to connect with my heroes, and the bombastic style just won't let me. It makes me feel like the adventurous lad in Hungarian folk tales who has to eat himself through a mountain of porridge, just to get on his way.

Re: Túrin melodrama

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I like to connect with my heroes

I have the same problem with much of The Silmarillion. I never found my way to the "heart" of the Elven stories. The stories about the Men were the bits that really moved me. Actually, it's the "Narn i Hin Hurin" from Unfinished Tales that really got me into the story of Turin, and there's much more there to allow a reader to connect to him and his family, particularly with the death of Lalaith.

Re: Túrin melodrama

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I love Elven stories... but those of the Second, and even more of the Third Age. Elrond, Celebrimbor, Gildor, Gil-galad, and, before all else, Thranduil and his family. Not so much into the Noldor of the First Age, myself. Especially Galadriel.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

To my shame I have yet to find the time to read The Silmarillion. I have read bits, but not all of it. It still impresses me the range of different writing styles that Tolkien could employ, from children's bed-time stories in Bilbo, through an epic novel in The Lord of the Rings to myths in Silmarillion.

Edited to fix html-code -- again! I don't seem to be doing to well with it today...

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I don't think I've ever read the Silm as a whole. I read bits and pieces of it, but as a whole... the pompous style gets on my nerves every single time. Personally, I much prefer the Unfinished Tales and HoMe, even though one can't read them as books on their own.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Cycling home from work I came up with what I think is an excellent plan for dealing with this: I like reading, and when I was younger I always read a bit in bed before going to sleep. I had to stop this practice because I wasn't very good at keeping it to a little bit and ended up not going to sleep until far too late and then either being very tired at work the next morning or just coming in very late. Recently I found a book of short short-stories that my sister-in-law's mother gave me for Christmas last year and I have been allowing myself one of these each evening when I get to bed before midnight. I now only have two left, so I need something else with short texts that I will be able to stop reading. From what people tell me of and my own very limited foray into The Silmarillion this should fit the bill. :-)

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I really need to finish reading UT and those volumes of HOME that I have, especially as I got two more volumes recently second hand - just came across them on one of the market stalls that sell random books. :D

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I was really pleased it won, one in the eye for all the literati who insisted it was rubbish!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Me too! Somebody asked me at the time (since they knew I enjoyed the Harry Potter books) whether I was disappointed that didn't win. I really wasn't and was a bit surprised that I had to explain that while Rowling's books are a good read and quite fun, they are not great literature on the scale of Tolkien, Lee and Austen.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

It seems like too many people can't understand the difference between enjoying something and thinking that it is good. Personally for books, I think that the best of them are both, but there is always a place for fun books to read lightly and for fun, as well as a place for book that aren't much fun to read but a 'great' or something in terms literature - like the kind of books that make people think or learn. :)

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Frivolous isn't a bad thing, but as you say the best books are the ones that are enjoyable to read and make us think and learn. What upsets me even more than people not realizing you might just read a book for fun is when they assume just because people enjoy reading something it isn't "good literature". There are of course books that are never going to be fun to read -- from a recent discussion with other friends Kafka springs to mind as an obvious example -- because of subject matter for example, but I always remember a bit in one of the later Dorothy Sayers books where Harriet says she tries to put in things to make people think when they aren't looking. If it is obviously there to make you learn something I think that is often bad writing.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

It depends on the book with learning, for example if I pick up a historical novel set in a period that I know little about or a mystery set around something I don't know, I would feel disappointed if I didn't feel like I had learnt quite a bit from it. But in general, I agree. :)

Although, I also recall a book that really annoyed me, because it was a mystery that left a clue out commenting that it was too obvious to state, which I didn't manage to work out until after the end of the book.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I certainly don't object to learning things from books -- it is my preferred method of finding anything out after all. What I meant (and didn't state very clearly) is that if something is obviously in a book/text just to teach you something then that is laziness on the author's part, unless he/she is writing a text book.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Totally agree. Sorry I misunderstood before - possibly due to too much typing in so many conversations at the same time (but it is so much fun)! :D

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Realised that I missed replying to this in my first comment:

What upsets me even more than people not realizing you might just read a book for fun is when they assume just because people enjoy reading something it isn't "good literature".

Very true! :)

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I was happy about that as well, especially as if I recall correctly I thought that there were too many books on the list that people thought were good rather than actually enjoyed reading (both of which I think should be taken into account).

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, a sort of, "Hmm, well, I suppose I'd better vote for Ulysses, not that I got past the first ten pages..." ;-)

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Because people believe it when they are told that a book is great literature and if they don't like it, it is their ignorance/lack of education. (Of course, this isn't all people, just sadly too many, although enough people voted for LotR for it to win). :)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was great to see a book win because people loved that book. I watched a lot of BBC documentaries around the time the Big Read was on, with many critics being stuffy about things - and then an interviewer would get them to talk about what they read when they were fourteen and fifteen, and their whole demeanours would change: eyes sparkling, talking excitedly. Back when they were not self-conscious about reading. Very interesting.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Wow! That is very interesting. :)