My reading list has been replenished once again. 🤗🤓📚

An old recipe • The cookies Dea and I baked are among the traditional Christmas treats of my childhood. 😋

I was surprised to learn from my mother's note that the original recipe has been passed down through our family since the time of our great-great-grandmother, around the middle of the 19th century.

This is how the fourth of November began: with homemade Finnish cinnamon rolls. 😋

I managed to capture a special moment while walking the dog.

The path was completely empty, with nothing but leaves steadily drifting down around us. It felt good to stop for a while and simply be present.

Yesterday's sunshine lured me out into the nature.

I had lunch at the Erzsébet-kilátó (lookout tower) on János-hegy, then walked over to Normafa.

(On the fifth photo, the building in the middle is the Parliament.)

A trip to Aquincum

Book Week II • I was back there on Sunday as well.

Anna Mécs signed my copy of Gyerekzár for me. (She had already written a dedication in my copy of Kapcsolati hiba at an earlier event.) I first got to know her through the Ms. Columbo literary discussions, back when I lived just around the corner from Jedermann, and I've been a reader of her work ever since.

Patchwork contains short stories by my aunt and poems by her cousin.

This year's Book Week was less about finding new books and more about meeting the writers whose work means a lot to me. My reading queue is already long enough as it is. 📚🙂

Book Week I • I started the day at Láng Téka, where I listened to Ádám Nádasdy, and he signed my copy of his book. I then stayed for a conversation between Gergely Péterfy and Éva Péterfy-Novák.

Later, I stopped by my father's signing session at the Pont Publishing pavilion on the square. To round off the day, Kata Tisza wrote a personal dedication in my copy of her new book.

The last time I attended one of her talks in person was on the final evening before last year's lockdown. Since then, I've only been able to listen to her online. It felt good to see her again in person and exchange a few words. I'm already looking forward to her next book. 📚 October is almost here.

I volunteered at a vaccination site today at Bethesda Children's Hospital. It felt great to be able to contribute to the fight against the pandemic, and it was inspiring to witness the dedication and kindness of the staff working there. I'm also grateful to Nokia for its support.

Let me smell it! What kind of tea did you drink?

We learned it! ☺️

Camouflage.

Timothy Snyder's words feel especially relevant today.

📖 Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

🤩 Regular Cherry Coke is back! The full-sugar, full-flavour version, not the sugar-free one!

Do you think it tastes the same as it used to?

The #korvapuusti 🇫🇮 is in the oven right now.

It has puffed up quite a bit, despite my attempts to press the tops down. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Korvapuusti is a traditional Finnish pastry made with cardamom-spiced dough and usually filled with either cinnamon or cocoa. I went with the cocoa version this time.

My reading backlog is filled up for a while. 🙂📚

There aren't many video games available in Finnish, but I managed to find one set in Moominvalley.

I'm starting to catch the occasional familiar expression or fragment of a sentence, and I've picked up some new words too, like postimerkki ("stamp").

And really, who wouldn't want to sort stamps with Hemulen?

Following yesterday's soup, today's meal was homemade potato chips with ketchup and Mexican-style sauce instead of the planned fried eggs. 😋

Sour cherry soup thickened with punch pudding powder, served with homemade meringues.

The leftover egg yolks didn't go to waste either. They became the second yolks in a pair of sunny-side-up eggs served as the next course.

🇫🇮 Finnish butter pulla. My first attempt.

Light, delicious, and perfect with a cup of tea. 😋 Next time, if I remember to brush it with egg white before baking, it'll look even better.

The first one has bloomed, and the others are on their way.

The Bullet That Killed Pushkin • A brutally powerful novel that holds up an uncomfortable mirror.

Intellectuals retreat into Waldstein House-like islands, seeking refuge from a barbaric present and trying to insulate themselves from the destructive experiments of Nazism and socialism. Yet while we imagine ourselves safe on our little islands, the barbarism of ignorance has already crossed the threshold. With one hand it cripples children; with the other it crushes the spirit of women.

There is still the option of retreating to the attic, gazing back at the past in horror and nostalgia. But by then it is no longer a refuge: it is a prison. A solitary cell built from an unspoken past, a constantly denied reality, and the lies told in the name of a better tomorrow. Everyone lives there in fear instead of truly living.

Many of our own personal tragedies echo through these pages.

Disturbing. Powerful. Essential reading.

For anyone seeking to understand the past century of Hungarian history (and the present) there is a key novel to be found in Gergely Péterfy's book.

After rearranging the desk, I paused for a moment, wondering how the light from the lamp had suddenly become square.

The chapters are short, fairly dense, and highly readable.

It's the kind of book you can take off the shelf again and again whenever you need guidance on a particular question or challenge. It offers an excellent overview of each topic, bringing together some of the most helpful insights from contemporary psychology.

These aren't proclamations or absolute truths. Instead, they encourage us to reflect and discover our own answers.

A productive January on the grid.

DIY Lego train track • Trust me, I'm an engineer...

A well-balanced book in the best sense of the word. Clear and accessible, appropriately objective, yet never devoid of emotion.

Its value goes far beyond the usefulness of the information it contains. With an honest voice, it offers not only education and greater awareness, but also thoughtful reflections on many timely questions, such as taking responsibility for our physical and mental well-being, the search for identity, and what it means to be a woman.

This bundle of books must have gotten stuck in the chimney at Christmas, because it only just reached us.

There was something in it for everyone, young and old, on two legs and four alike.