MadMania

Faith, Books, and Stuff

Category: books

Review: A Death in the Venetian Quarter

Alan Gordon’s is one of a series of mysteries set around 1200 AD and based on characters from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The main characters are jesters who belong to the Fool’s Guild, who in this particular novel attempt to solve a murder and prevent the fall of Constantinople. Judging the book by its cover like […]

Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox (movie)

I really can’t say enough good things about this movie. I love the story, direction, music, animation, and acting. I went into this movie with no preconceived notions (I barely knew a thing about it, not even that it was based on a Roald Dahl book), and it was awesome. George Clooney is hilarious as […]

8 Cardinal Virtues of George Washington Carver

The world is a better place thanks to George Washington Carver, and not just for his brilliant invention of peanut butter. The following is excerpted from a thank-you he wrote to the members of his senior class at the Tuskegee Institute: “…it is needless for me to keep saying, I hope, except for emphasis, that […]

Review: Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (movie)

I saw this movie before I had read the book. In fact, I had barely even heard of the book. So I had no expectations going into it, either good or bad. It wasn’t very good. The very first conversation in the movie already seems out of place–stating a situation that already seems to defy […]

I made pie

I made my first two pies this weekend. I’ve been re-reading Pascale LeDraolec’s American Pie (nothing to do with movie of the same name). It chronicle’s the author’s drive across America looking for pie, and it includes a bunch of pie recipes. My first two attempts were marriage pies (pies containing two different but complementary […]

Review: Julie & Julia

I just finished staying up with Heather watching Julie & Julia, a 2009 movie about two women: Julie Powell, as she spends a year cooking her way through all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking while living in post-9/11 New York with her husband. It also tells the story of Julia […]