wiseheart | Party time ahead!

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Favourite book? That is a very hard question! :)
There are so many books I love, it makes it really hard to choose a favourite.

To name several, limiting myself to one book or series by an author:

Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome - children's books written and set in the 1930s about children camping, sailing and playing games of imagination in the Lake District. There are so many reasons why I loves these, the main on is that each of the children have their own strengths and weaknesses and these all play their part in the stories.

Lions Of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay - historical fantasy set in a alternative version of Reconquest Spain. Very detailed and characters from all sides are shown without any feeling that there is one side that is right and the others are wrong. Individual characters are good, bad or mixed, mostly mixed and have their own motivations and values which inform their actions. It is also a book that makes me cry at the end, but without seeming too morbid.

Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold - historical fantasy set in an alternative world parallel to Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. A world where there are gods who intervene in the world, but can only work through people who let them. Twisty and very detailed.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott - historical novel based in England in the reign of Richard I. A nostalgia favourite, I think I was about 6 when my father first read this to me. I know there are problems with it - and I like having read it enough to know which bits I can skip. I really enjoyed the way that the reader keeps finding out more and so many of the characters aren't who they appear to be when the reader first encounters them.

Lord Of The Rings - obviously. Engrossing and such a sense of the world going on around the edges of the story with all the details of everything - history, language etc.

Interesting to see that I've picked 3 fantasy novels, 3 historical (of various types) and 1 children's book. I'm surprised as I read lots of science fiction, but thinking about it most of that is more light reading than the ones that I count as my favourites. I could list more, but I think this will do for now. :)

Well, at least we share two of these: Ivanhoe and LOTR. The other fantasy books you've mentioned sound interesting, too. Never heard of them before, but again, they don't import the really good stuff all that often here. :(

They are very good. Lois McMaster Bujold's books hardly ever seem to be in bookshops here - I only started reading her books after my sister gave me one as a present. All of her books are good, although personally I find that the Chalion series are the best overall.
All of Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fantasy books are really good and, apart from Lord Of Emperors (sequel to Sailing To Sarantium, stand alone, although some of them are set in the same world. I don't like his straight fantasy ones as much, although I haven't read them for several years and keep meaning to reread to see if they are better than I remember, but I seem to have misplaced the first book in the series.

Curse of Chalion YEAH!

Let's hear it for Swallows and Amazons! There is a book that made my brothers and sister and me learn to sail and started my love for the Lake District. Who is your favourite character? Mine is Titty; I have always identified with her, partly because like her I am the second girl in a family of four children (Vicky/Bridget doesn't really count in the early books). However, I think it is the day-dreaming, the planning of adventures and way she feels responsible when alone with Roger that really does it.

My favourite is Nancy. I liked the way that she is so unconcerned with behaving as she should, her determination to have fun and solve any problem that comes up, her protectiveness of her mother.
I identified more with Titty as a child, but growing up I find that I identify more with Susan as well. As I child, I saw Titty as being like I was and Nancy as being who I would like to have been.
I did also make me love the Lake District - and was probably part of the reason I chose here (Lancaster) to go to university - not that I actually have spent as much time visiting it from here as I had expected, but still.

I love Nancy, too, and like you she represented the person I would have liked to be. Now I think I am quite happy to be a Titty, though sometimes I feel a bit like a Peggy. Isn't it fantastic that a man writing in the 1930's created these female characters that are strong and interesting and feel so very real, that we can identify with them? This is one of the reasons I get upset with people complaining that J.K. Rowling wrote books with a male main character; why should we have to limit ourselves to writing about people who share a gender with us? What we should do is complain if/about male authors not writing good female characters!

Yes. I hate the whole "write what you know" philosophy - it seems to me that there are so many wonderful books that fall outside that and many bad books written because of it. Personally, I prefer to read books and then decide whether there is a problem with it rather than assume that facts about the author will influence the book (although I listen if people I trust tell me there are problems that will annoy me, but I read a lot of old books and prefer to be able to read them without needing the author to have modern sensibilities)
I agree that the best thing about his characters is that they feel so real and that makes them much easier to identify with, even as the books are so set in their period (I would say dated, but that is taken as a bad thing and I can't think of the right word for dated-in-a-good-way). :)

Party time ahead!

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