Indeed, Indeed!

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does." Allen Ginsberg

Let's Play!

Here are the rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. They don't have to be the greatest books you've ever read, just the ones that stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares (the complete series
2. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
3. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
4. Bridges Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
6. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
8. A Self-Portrait in Letters by Anne Sexton
9. Bögre Azur by Varró Dániel
10. The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
11. Lolita by Nabokov
12. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
13. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
14. My Life in France by Julia Child 
15. The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

...This is it, I guess. What a shame I have a really bad memory and can't remember anything, not even books without taking out my lists and notes.

I've Got Mail

 

  

You remember that I wrote about bookmooching a couple of weeks ago, right? I registered a few books of mine on Bookmooch  that I am ready to get rid of, and in return I got to pick some other volumes I am longing to put my hands on. Today I received the very first book I mooched: it's Empire Falls by Richard Russo. It was sent from as far as Japan from a girl named Selena, and the delivery took about 10 days. I had quite forgotten that one of life's little pleasures is receiving postcards, letters, and packages by good old snail mail. I love all the forign signs and the beautiful stamps on the envelop. Bookmooching is fun!:)

"I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care." Jean Rhys

"This thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had — stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I’ve ever done." Katherine Anne Porter, The Paris Review, 1963

"With rebellion, awareness is born." Albert Camus

"If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else." Cornelia Funke

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about." John Steinbeck, East of Eden

30 Famous Authors Whose Works Were Rejected

You can find the whole list here. 

Btw, who would have thought?

"Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray  for company." ~Sylvia Plath

"I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires—” “You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other. “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination." This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"…a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it." Atonement, Ian McEwan

FYI, Atonement is a great novel, with an amazing story. Everyone should read it. Twice.

30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Their 30th Birthday

1. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee .
4. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
6. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
7. The Rights of Man by Tom Paine
8. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
10. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
11. The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
12. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
13. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
14. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
15. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
16. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
17. Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
18. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
21. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
22. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
23. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
24. The Republic by Plato
25. Lolitaby Nabokov
26. Getting Things Done by David Allen
27. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
28. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
29. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
30. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
31. BONUS:  How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
32. BONUS:  Honeymoon with My Brother by Franz Wisner 

You can find the whole article here. I only read three out of the 30, so I guess I have plenty of reading to do in the next 6 and a half years. 
How many have you read?

"Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." Miriam Beard

Baking Time! - Chocolate-chip Cookies

Today I made chocolate chip cookies. It was the fifth or sixth time I have baked them: the first time was back in January, I think I even wrote about it here. That recipe was from a Hungarian chocolate-themed cookery book I borrowed from a friend of mine. That  recipe turned out to be a pretty good one, resulting yummy and crispy cookies with oozing chocolat chips in it. Yet, I wasn't completely happy with it, because it did not really resembe to the traditional American-style chocolate-chip cookies, or at least to the ones I bought and tried in England. These were too biscuit-like, too crunchy and crispy, not cookie-ish enough. (You know what I mean, right?) Nevertheless, I made them again later a few times, everyone loved it, but I thought that it wasn't the real thing.

A couple of weeks ago it popped into my mind to bake chocolate-chip cookies again, and this time I used the help of my good old friend, Google, to find the perfect recipe. This is what I decided to use this time. I have already tried a couple of recipes from All Recipes, they turned out pretty well, especially my (and everyone's) favorite Carrot Cake (Note to self: I must write a blog entry about that cake.) More than 38,000 (!) people had already saved this chocolate-chip cookie recipe,  and there were over 2,500 comments saying that this recipe is excellent and results wonderful cookies. So I really wasn't putting my money on a dark horse. I baked the cookies; it did, indeed, turn out pretty well, not perfect to my taste, though: they were way too sweet (after all it was an American recipe, right?), rather crispy, and a bit too dry as well. (Probably because I overbaked it.)

Anyway, today I gave the recipe another try, but this time I made a few changes here and there. So this is how my slightly altered recipe goes:

Ingredients: 

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2- 3/4 cup white sugar (depends on how sweet you like your cookies)

1 pack of Vanilla flavored sugar

1 egg

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon hot water

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts/ peanuts/ walnuts (whichever you like the most)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to175 degrees C.
2. Cream together the butter, the white sugar and the Vanilla flavored sugar until smooth. Beat in the egg. Dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add to batter along with salt. Stir in flour, chocolate chips, and nuts. Drop by small spoonfuls onto ungreased pans.
3. Bake for about 10-12 minutes in the preheated oven, or until edges are nicely browned. 

Notes: 

• If you have checked the recipe on All Recipes, you realize that I halved the ingredients, because I wanted to make only  half a portion. Yet, I ended up with about 40 (!) cookies, so the All Recipes porton is rather large, while the one I baked is the half of it. 
• Drop by REALLY small spoonfuls onto  the ungreased pans, otherwise you will end up with as large cookies as you palm. The baking soda does its work pretty well, after all.
• It may not seem that way, but 12 minutes of baking is, indeed, enough. You don't have to wait until the dough turns brown because then it gets too dry, crispy, and biscuit-like. It is enough if the dough is golden and the  edges are slightly crispy.
• Finally: Have fun baking it! It is really easy.:)

Visual Aid:)

Let's Mooch!

Wouldn't it be great if you could swap books with all the other booklovers of the world? You could simply send the book you don't want anymore to someone who is dying to put their hands on it and, in return, receive something you have been longing for ages. All for free, you are simply swapping books after all, you only have to pay  for the postage of the volume you are sending. Well, this thing does exist in the shape and form of a website, and its name is Bookmooch.  It is brilliant.

A few days ago it popped into my head that there used to be a thing called Postcrossing by which you could get postcards from all over the world, from total strangers, and in return the only thing you had to do is to send postcards from your town to other random people in other random cites and countries. I used to do it for a short period of time a few years ago back in England, and enjoyed it fairly much. It is fun to get mail from all over the world, especially nowadays when our lives are taken over by multimedia: we are happy to camp down in front of our laptops and spend hour after hour surfing the world wide web, building and maintaining virtual friendships and relationships via email, facebook, blogging, chatrooms and messengers while our ears are plugged in with our precious little iPods so we can absolutely cut out the world that exists behind our backs and over the screen of the computer. I know it's a cliche but in the 21st century when it is so incredibly easy to alienate ourselves, everybody needs a little bit of human touch, and that could easily be Postcrossing. I hate the Hungarian Postal Service with all my heart and I would cut it out completely if I could, yet, there's a good chance I shall start posting postcards again,  because I believe that Postcrossing is a good idea. Not only because you have the pleasure of receiving mail but because you also get to know about places that you had had know idea they existed. And I might wind up going to one of those places some day. 

So, as Postcrossing popped into my had, it occurred to me that there must also be a thing called Bookcrossing. I looked it up, and, indeed, it does exist. It works a little differently though, you don't simply post one of your unwanted books to a random address, but you leave it  somewhere in a public place with a special Bookcrossing ID in it. Then you start hoping that someone will find it, pick it up, then register it on the website. However, it works the other way around too, there's is a database of the  exact places/cities where members left their books and you can go there, pick them up, then register them. Sounds fun, doesn't it? It's like hunting for chocolate eggs in your back garden at Easter in England, except it's better and more fun because you get to hunt for a book in a real, life-size city. I am returning to Budapest tomorrow, then I will hopefully and difinitely try to nail down a couple of books and release a couple into the wild.

Another, but more organized and secure way for swapping books is Bookmooch. It is also a website I found a few days ago, and have been sort of hooked to it ever since. It is basically a virtual market for swapping books: you register the volumes you are willing the get rid of and wait until someone shows up and asks for one of them. You can also browse for books that are ready to be mooched, and put together a Wishlist or a Save-it-for-later list. I only registered yesterday morning, added ten books that I am happy to post to someone else, and of those ten volumes two have already found their new owners. I have also requested two books from other members of Bookmooch, hopefully these will arrive sometime soon. Sounds fun, right? Especially for such a bookaholic, as I am.

Catching up, Round 2

So it's been almost two weeks since I have written a proper post. I could simply say that I was super lazy, which I was, however, I have also been in a creative mood and made my self busy with a few little projects. So, in the past couple of weeks:

 * I did a little bit of glass painting. The first time I painted on glass was about 10 years ago. I enjoyed it from the very first moment, yet, I had not done it in the past 5 or 6 years, so it was absolutely fun to freshen up  my painting skills. I most certainly will not wait another 5 years to paint my next piece of glass.

 * I roamed the streets of Miskolc and found cheerful & colorful houses.

* I also did some serious digging at home and found good old casette tapes which nowadays we consider a piece of history from the good old '80s and '90s.

* I also came across my Mom's recipe collection with all the teeny-tiny, worn-down and torn-out pieces of papers that turned beautiful yellow  and became greasy over the years. And I must mention that the pages smell like cookies.:)

* Then last week I went a paint shop to buy some paint, for I was going to repaint my dorm room. However, I did not only pick up a bucket of rich red paint but finally collected a few pieces of paint chips as well... then I came home and played with it for a little while.

* I learned how to make origami cranes and made a few, for I am planning to create a mobile made of cranes, all colored in different shades of the rainbow.

 * I have spent several hours looking for beautiful fabrics in dry goods shops, then designing, cutting and sewing brooches. Or simply figuring out how to make them. They are still under construction, but I will hopefully finish them in the next few days and kick of my little Meska shop later this week.

 * Then on Friday I travelled to Zagreb to cheer for the Hungarian Waterpolo Team, as they were playing against Russia in the European Championship. We had really good seats, so no wonder I took a couple of hundred photos!

* On Saturday I went to pick up the book I won a couple of weeks ago. I do know that this novel has hardly anything to do with literature, yet, I am kind of curious about it.

* Then I popped over to my favorite second-hand book shop where I only wanted to browse for a little bit. But I found some real treasure and could not resist buying Claire Tomalin's biographical book on Jane Austen. I am utterly intersted the private life of Jane Austen. Well, of all my favorite writers/poets, for that matter.  I adore this supersytlish Penguin design, btw!

 * Then on Sunday I did my very first painting-gig, just on my own. It turned out to be pretty easy, and I was done with it in no time! :) I love living in a red room, not to mention how much  I adore this beautiful, rich shade of red!

So this is what I've been up to lately.:)