Musical – Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

When was the last time you thought, “Wow. That was absolutely breath-taking?” Well, the last time I had to sit back and could literally feel my jaw dropping was not too long ago, one month to be exact. During my New York trip I treated myself to a Broadway show and decided to see the musical Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. If you want to know why I think so highly of the production read on and find out yourselves.

Now in its third year, the spectacular Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has turned out to be the most expensive and technically elaborate theatrical production of all times. The story is based on the Marvel comic-strip superhero and the Hollywood film of 2002. The Broadway show lasts for two and a half hours, including one intermission, and tells the story of the teenager Peter Parker, whose unremarkable life takes a sudden turn when he learns about his astonishing powers. He soon has to take great responsibility over the people and the city of New York.

The flying sequences and aerial stunts are jaw-dropping! The actors move around the stage in mystifying speed and make it a superbly dynamic show. The splendour stage design contributes to a breath-taking atmosphere and extravagancy. An 18-piece orchestra in two rooms backstage perform marvellous live music written by U2’s Bono and The Edge, and all eighteen songs are performed live on stage.

Go ahead and watch the trailer and decide yourselves whether or not you would want to see the show. Lately, more and more negative reviews about the show have been published, referring to the musical as one of the bigger flops in Broadway history. I can assure you that I found the musical overwhelming and think of actors, musicians, producers, and everyone who put their hands on the project very highly and would like to conclude with praise for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark: a flabbergasting show!

Review – Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

Who comes to your mind when you are asked to think about post-colonial British authors? Close your eyes for a few seconds; think hard; then open your eyes and tell me what you came up with. Hmh, let me think …. Kazuo Ishiguro! Does the name ring a bell? Yes? Excellent! I think it’s time to talk about one of Britain’s most eminent writers. He has won the Booker Prize for The Remains of Day in 1989. Even though his last publication was some time ago, in 2009 to be exact, this does not mean that it’s too late to talk about Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.

Image provided by Random House¹

Summary quoted from Random House¹:

With the clarity and precision that have become his trademarks, Kazuo Ishiguro interlocks five short pieces of fiction to create a world that resonates with emotion, heartbreak, and humor. Here is a fragile, once famous singer, turning his back on the one thing he loves; a music junky with little else to offer his friends but opinion; a songwriter who inadvertently breaks up a marriage; a jazz musician who thinks the answer to his career lies in changing his physical appearance; and a young cellist whose tutor has devised a remarkable way to foster his talent. For each, music is a central part of their lives and, in one way or another, delivers them to an epiphany.

My Thoughts:

Nocturnes is Ishiguro’s first collection of short stories and consists of five parts: “Crooner”, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, “Malvern Hills”, “Nocturne” and “Cellist”. What bind the stories together are recurring themes and characters which are all tightly connected with music, musicians and music lovers. They are all written in prose style and every story has its own delightful and charming twist.

Basically, Nocturnes tells the story of people who have not yet fulfilled their dreams, about people who live ordinary lives and about the sacrifices they have to make every day. We all have a vision of who we are, but very often the world does not allow us to fulfill your dreams. All the characters in Nocturnes struggle with their lives; some get it right, some get it wrong, but they all have to overcome obstacles. I guess this is what makes the book so attractive to us normal ones. It shows that fictional characters are not superheroes after all.

When I got hold of Nocturnes, I expected to really love this collection and I have to admit that I found it wonderful in parts. It would be a lie to claim that Nocturnes is absolutely superb, because there are a few flaws in the novel. But all in all, it’s a nice and entertaining read for everyone who likes humorous, cynical and serious stories.

¹ http://www.randomhouse.com/book/85610/nocturnes-by-kazuo-ishiguro

Liebster Award

Joana from Joana in the Sky with Books nominated us for the Liebster Award. Thanks Joana 🙂 We really feel honored!

And to the creators of this award: Thanks for this wonderful award. 🙂 But do you have any idea how hard it is to find 10 blogs with less than 200 followers? We found 4 among those we were already following and then we spent about 2 hours to find another 6 that fulfilled the criteria and that we liked. Of course we only wanted to give the award to blogs that we really liked. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any search engine out there to look for recently created blogs. How awful is that? (not that you, dear award creators, are responsible for that) Rant over 😀 Still, we feel very honored and are very happy to have received this award 🙂

The Liebster Award is a way to help new blogs with less than 200 followers to gain new followers. By awarding the Liebster award, we can show our followers that there are other great blogs out there to explore.

 

Rules:

• Link back the blogger that tagged you;
• Nominate 10 others and answer the questions of the one who tagged you;
• Ask 10 questions for the bloggers you nominate;
• Let your nominees know of their award.

Joana has prepared 10 questions for us to answer:

1. What are you currently reading?

Darklittle: The Wishing Thread by Lisa Van Allen and Provence,1970 by Luke Barr

Miss Treegarden: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

2. Do you have any weird bookish habits?

Miss Treegarden: Not that I can think of.

Darklittle: I like to smell and stroke books, but I think that’s something most book lovers do, right?

3. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

Darklittle: That’s a though one. I could be biased here, but right now that would be Life After Life by Kate Atkinson 😀

Miss Treegarden: Tricky question, but I guess I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on Night Train to Lisbon by Peter Bieri alias Pascal Mercier.

4. Which is your favourite secondary character?

Miss Treegarden: Difficult to decide on. I really like Ben’s grandmother from Gangsta Granny by David Walliams. She’s hilarious!

Darklittle: Oh dear… I don’t like these decisions. I think it’s Eeyore from A. A. Milne’s Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh.

5. What is your main blogging goal at the moment?

To make us and our readers happy 🙂

6. Do you prefer series or stand-alones?

Darklittle: Until about a year ago, I really liked series, but I became tired of them. Now I really prefer stand-alones!

Miss Treegarden: Usually I decide on stand-alones, because I’m eager to experience a great variety of stories. But should I get hold of book which is part of a series and I like it, I am happy to read the sequels and often can’t wait for the latest books to be released. Sometimes, there are books with an open ending and I really wish for a sequel, which might, however, never be published.

7. What made you decide to create a blog?

Darklittle: I wanted to share my thoughts on English-language literature.

8. If you could meet any author, who would you choose?

Miss Treegarden: This one I know for sure: Roald Dahl.

Darklittle: Hmm… another tough one. J. M. Barrie, or Michael Bond perhaps 🙂

9. What has been your happiest moment as a blogger?

Darklittle: I think the day I realized that there were a bunch of people following my blog and that some of them were actually reading what I wrote 😉

Miss Treegarden: Reading my first post and getting three likes in a row 🙂 I thought, wow, someone is actually reading this and they seem to like it 🙂

10. What made you want to start a blog?

Darklittle: Didn’t I already answer this question? 😀

And this are our 10 questions:

1. What is the first book that you can remember “reading”?
2. Do you have a book recommendation for Halloween?
3. What is your opinion on memes like “Waiting on Wednesday”? Do you like them? Do you use them?
4. What do you like most about blogging?
5. How do you prefer to read? / Where is your favorite place to read?
6. What is your favorite genre?
7. Which three adjectives would choose to describe your favorite character.
8. Do you think the names of the characters in novels are important?
9. Which place would you set up as a meeting point (fact of fictional), if you got the chance to meet your favorite character.
10. Which book would you like to see turned into a movie?

We nominate the following 10 blogs:

English-language blogs

zeteticat from Bookish Habits

Ciska from Ciska’s Book Chest

Rose from i LIVE LITERARY

holliekins from Much Ado About Books

Scentfragrance from Scentfragrance

Helois from Stain On The Page

Melanie from the coffee club (and me) (We can’t see how many followers you have, but we like your blog, so we nominated you)

German-language blogs:

Donata Bichler from Donatas Bücher

RoteZora from Dreams about Books

Ina_Kzeptabel from Ina_Kzeptabel(t)

Incoming – The Wishing Thread

Look what the postman brought today: It’s the German edition of Lisa Van Allen‘s The Wishing Thread. It’s next on my TBR pile and the lovely people at Aufbau Verlag even added this bracelet which matches the topic of the book. Thank you so much ❤ I love the colors!
(Btw.: I got the book through Lovelybooks 🙂 )

Oh and if my male followers are wondering when I’ll be reading something more “manly” again. The time will come, I promise. Science Fiction and my beloved Pirate Tales are waiting 😀

More on the German edition can be found here.

An English summary quoted from Random House¹:

The Van Ripper women have been the talk of Tarrytown, New York, for centuries. Some say they’re angels; some say they’re crooks. In their tumbledown “Stitchery,” not far from the stomping grounds of the legendary Headless Horseman, the Van Ripper sisters—Aubrey, Bitty, and Meggie—are said to knit people’s most ardent wishes into beautiful scarves and mittens, granting them health, success, or even a blossoming romance. But for the magic to work, sacrifices must be made—and no one knows that better than the Van Rippers.

When the Stitchery matriarch, Mariah, dies, she leaves the yarn shop to her three nieces. Aubrey, shy and reliable, has dedicated her life to weaving spells for the community, though her sisters have long stayed away. Bitty, pragmatic and persistent, has always been skeptical of magic and wants her children to have a normal, nonmagical life. Meggie, restless and free-spirited, follows her own set of rules. Now, after Mariah’s death forces a reunion, the sisters must reassess the state of their lives even as they decide the fate of the Stitchery. But their relationships with one another—and their beliefs in magic—are put to the test. Will the threads hold?

¹ http://www.randomhouse.com/book/221371/the-wishing-thread-by-lisa-van-allen

Movie – Everybody’s Fine

“Tell me the good news and spare me the bad”

Everybody’s fine. Seriously? Are Frank Goode’s four children, now grown-ups and settled all across the US, truly as fine as they claim to be? When they all cancelled on him for a family reunion, Frank decides to surprise them, turning up at their homes unexpectedly. What starts as a heart-warming dramatic comedy, turns out to be a hectic road movie, taking Frank on trains and Greyhound buses from New York to Chicago, Denver and Las Vegas.

Written and directed by Kirk Jones, Everybody’s Fine is an entertaining remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Stanno Tutti Bene, starring Robert De Niro as Frank Goode who tries to live the American Dream and expects his children to work hard to achieve their goals. Since his children thought they did not live up to their father’s expectations, they decide to pretend to be someone they are not to make him proud.

His successful daughter Amy (Kate Beckinsale) pretends to be in a happy relationship, Robert (Sam Rockwell) turns out to be a percussionist instead of a world-class conductor, Rosie (Drew Barrymore) is not the supposed dancer and star of Vegas, and not until the end the audience gets to see artist David (Austin Lysy) who got into serious troubles in Mexico. But since our protagonist is a brilliant observer, and it doesn’t take him long to figure out the truth and what’s really going on.

Filled with numerous clichés, it is a touching and intelligently acted family drama, created about themes such as love, the importance of family and doing what makes you happy instead of living someone else’s dream. The movie is refreshingly open, even though we could have expected more sensitiveness from the actors. Nevertheless, Robert De Niro and his supporting cast did a great job and contributed to making Everybody’s Fine just fine.

Released by Miramax Films in 2009.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

“Everybody’s Fine” is rated PG-13.

Review – Life After Life

Hello there,

I’ve just finished what could become my personal book of the year 2013. I’m practically speechless, but I should write a review here, so I’ll see what I can come up with 😉 Oh, I almost forgot. The book I’m talking about is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson which was shortlisted for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Image provided by Hachette Book Group¹

Summary quoted from Hachette Book Group¹:

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can — will she?

My Thoughts:

Life after Life is mainly set in 20th century England and boy does Ms. Atkinson know how to create setting. I lay there in the grass, looking up at the sky. I breathed sun-filled air as well as gas. I saw the clear skies on the mountains and the darkness of muggy cellars. And then I went to war and found myself on top of a collapsed building, searching for survivors, while bombers were still dropping their deadly cargo all over London.

As you can see, Ms. Atkinson not only did a great job describing the setting, she also created a main character that I could easily identify with. This main character is Ursula and I loved to follow her through her many lives. Although follow seems to be the wrong word, as I often became one with Ursula. We simply merged. I seldom thought that one of her decisions was the wrong one. There are many other characters in Life After Life. Each of them is unique. I like how Ursula has a stronger bond with some and a weaker with others. Just like in real life.

I have never read a story like Life After Life and I think it is brilliant. In the beginning, I had no idea how the story is going to work out. The only thing I knew was that Ursula was able to live her life over and over again. I like where Ms. Atkinson takes her and how she let the story end. I love that this book offers so many emotions. Throughout the story there is love, loss, pain, hope, sorrow and happiness. You get the whole package. Life After Life is a book that shows you how much can change by deciding to do something different. I fully recommend this book to everyone!

¹https://www.hachettebookgroup.biz/titles/kate-atkinson/life-after-life/9780316176484/

Travel Review – New York City

“New York remains the most fabulous city on earth,” claims travel journalist Graham Boynton, and boy, is he right. Spending ten days in the Big Apple, I could appreciate a great deal of New York’s wonders, starting from juicy burgers to breath-taking Broadway shows. There are numerous reasons for why I made New York City my travel destination: a rich palette of cultural offerings, the ringing tills of Fifth Avenue, magnificent high-rise buildings, and extravagant boutique hotels.

Once the city had whetted my appetite, I couldn’t get enough of it. I enjoyed memorable walking tours through Greenwich Village, Soho, Little Italy, China Town, and the Financial District and experienced two more of New York’s five boroughs: Brooklyn and the Bronx. The city’s constant reinvention makes it an eye-catching venue which I looked at with great admiration.

I appreciated the glittering lights as described by Edith Wharton and dived into the big city’s night life while standing on top of the Rock. The Empire State has it all: from overcrowded and stuffy subway rides to cultural diversity in the various New York neighbourhoods. It’s no secret that life in New York has its price, but there are quite a few things to do which are for free, including spending time in Manhattan’s oasis: Central Park.

Visiting the magnificent Metropolitan Museum, strolling through Washington Square Park to walk off some of my lunch, admiring the New York Public Library and walking all the way up from Battery Park to 42nd Street contributed to making my stay an unforgettable experience. I loved my vacation, I loved the city, but I didn’t like what they call morning caffeine intake. Honestly, New Yorkers have to start taking coffee seriously!

Meet Miss Treegarden

Hi everybody 🙂

I’ve got news for you. From now on, I won’t be writing on my own, because my good friend Miss Treegarden will join me here on All That Magic. We’ve been studying at the same university for five years now and Miss Treegarden shares my love for English and history, so she studies both like I do.

Miss Treegarden is new to blogging and she wants to see what it’s like. She’ll write reviews of books she read and other things she cares about. Today, Miss Treegarden will start with a travel review of New York City. She just returned from a holiday and wanted to share her impressions with you. If Miss Treegarden really loves blogging, she might even take the big step and write her own blog some day.

Until then, we’ll do the magic together 🙂 Welcome Miss Treegarden!

Review – A Tale for the Time Being

As I’ve already told you a few days ago, I finished a book that took me a while to read. This book is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which is currently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I had a copy on my bookshelf from my Book Depository win this spring, so I decided to give it a go.

Image provided by Canongate¹

Summary quoted from Canongate¹:

‘Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.’

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.

In a small cafe in Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyberbullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place – and voice – through a diary she hopes will find a reader and friend who finally understands her.

My Thoughts:

A Tale for the Time Being is mostly set in the 21st century in Japan and Canada. The dominance of the setting changes with the location. The island where Ruth lives felt very clear to me. However, this could be because I’ve already been to British Columbia and Vancouver Island and know what the landscape looks like. But also the temple in Japan and its surroundings were clear, in contrast to Tokyo, which seemed blurry to me. Ms. Ozeki also uses the weather to create and intensify mood especially in Ruth’s chapters. I really like this concept.

The two main characters are Nao and Ruth. Even though Nao is 16 years old, she often acts like she is 14 or younger but on the other hand, she does things that (in my opinion) don’t fit her childish behavior. Well, let’s say, Nao has problems, which is hardly surprising if you read her story. Nevertheless, Nao’s character wasn’t always very believable throughout the book. I preferred Ruth. Her character seems to lead a steady life, but if you take a closer look, it isn’t all roses. Ruth is fascinated by Nao’s diary and wants to know all about that girl from Japan. I was really able to connect with Ruth, at least until the last few pages. Two other characters that I think were great are Nao’s father Haruki and Nao’s great-grandmother Jiko.

Now on to the hardest part (at least for me). The story. For the first ~125 pages, I had massive problems getting into the book. I was thinking about giving up on reading, because I didn’t care what was going to happen to Nao or to anyone else in the book. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that I hardly give up on a book. So I read on and it did get better. I finally wanted to know about Nao’s (and her father’s) fate. Sometimes, I even felt distracted by Ruth’s story between Nao’s passages. But there were still things that I didn’t like. There was too much talk of Zen Buddhism in the book and, unfortunately, the book started to get quite boring again towards the end (even though I like the main idea of the ending). Maybe A Tale for the Time Being just wasn’t meant for a time being like me.

¹ http://www.canongate.tv/a-tale-for-the-time-being.html