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Monday, January 19, 2026
Sunday, January 18, 2026
An Insane Threat
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| Beautiful Greenland from our trip in 2022. |
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| Even in summer, huge icebergs were blocking our ship at one point. What a fascinating place, and now the target of our horrible leader. |
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| In Greenland this week: a large percent of the people are protesting the insane threats of the US President to invade this beautiful country. |
Blog post © 2026
Original photos © 2022 mae sander
Crowd photo from news media
Murderers, Poets and Barbecue
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| Creepy country house in 1925. Helena Bonham Carter. Agatha Christie. New Netflick…Just wow! |
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| E.C.R. Lorac’s novel offers us another aristocratic family down on their luck, living in the ruins of their family manor. Suspense! Murder! More Wow! |
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| The Poet X — a poor high-school girl trying to become a poet. Couldn’t be more different from stories of the English aristocracy! |
Barbecue Take-Out for Dinner |
| Barbecue from Satchel’s: chicken, beef, coleslaw, salads, cornbread. |
Blog post © 2026 mae sander
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Overwhelmed by the Renaissance
A not-quite reading success…
“Every day of our lives we’re targeted by at least one lie about history.” (p. 25)
“The plague is as important as the Mona Lisa to our effort to understand this Renaissance, both terrible and great.” (p. 193)
“When you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women.” (p. 234)
“If you know only one thing about Savonarola it’s the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Renaissance’s darkest hour (nope), a mass book burning (nope) and art burning (nope), invented by Savonarola (nope) to exert the stifling force of Church and Faith against the broadening of art, science, and thought that he hated (still nope).” (p. 291)
“ I’ve looked through one of Galileo’s telescopes, it’s in Florence, and realizing it’s less powerful than the plastic Hamburglar binoculars I once got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal filled me with new awe that a cunning mind armed with the right questions can get a long, long way with simple tools.” (p. 570)
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My Reading
I only managed to sort-of-carefully read the first 500 pages of Ada Palmer’s tome Inventing the Renaissance. I scanned the rest. It’s much much too long, and it has a number of flaws, the main one being that it is precious in the sense of being affected and self-congratulatory. Worse yet, it’s constantly offering rather ordinary and boring bits of the author’s autobiography — mainly about her experience as a graduate student and her students’ reactions to the subject matter.
Inventing the Renaissance manages to cover several hundred years of humanist thought, to define many concepts, and to provide sketches of the accomplishments of dozens of thinkers of the age and many patrons of these thinkers. I’m a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella d’Este, Michelangelo, Lucrezia Borgia, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli, several members of the Medici family, Benvenuto Cellini (“the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer”), and so on. It’s interesting to read a not-so-critical view of Savonarola. But eventually the level of detail seems brutal, especially when one’s boredom is amplified by details of the author’s academic career.
Of course the book provides a huge dose of historic narrative, character studies of many Renaissance figures, summaries of philosophical narratives, introductions to the major thinkers and interests of the age (both famous ones and obscure ones), a bit about the politics of art works like Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, and much more. At the end, there’s even a brief history of printing — which in my opinion deserves more prominence: the author characterizes the introduction of printed books as “an information revolution: not new technology (we’re on the Gutenberg-type press until the nineteenth century) but a distribution network revolution.” (p. 587) I felt that her view was weak.
Unless you are a glutton for an extreme level of detail about obscure points, and unless you are a fan of the author’s fascination with her own life and academic achievements, I strongly doubt that you would enjoy reading this book. And although I have in the past immersed myself in some of the biographies of the same individuals featured here, I found it horrendously dense and challenging to follow, which is not a compliment. I say: leave the reading of this academic stuff to the professionals!
Thinking of Famous Art in the Renaissance
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| I enjoyed the art history, such as discussion of Michelangelo’s slaves. |
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| Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel. One of the most amazing mural paintings in history: the book has interesting historical info about this art work and its creator. Shared with Deb’s Sunday salon at Readerbuzz. |
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Leonardo’s portrait of Cecelia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan was painted when Leonardo was “sent there by Lorenzo de Medici as something between an ambassador and a gift for his Sforza allies.” (p. 326) The ermine is shared with Eileen’s Critters!
Blog post © 2025 mae sander
Photos of art works from Wikipedia
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Cooking Dinner
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| Carrot salad (partially made) and tuna steaks on the kitchen counter before dinner prep begins. |
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| Ingredients for tuna steak recipe from the New York Times. |
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| Tuna, mostly covered by the pepper-olive-and lemon zest. |
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| Carrot salad, partly eaten. |
Blog post © 2026 mae sander
Sunday, January 11, 2026
On the Weekend
Brunch at Alice’s Apartment
Dinner at Home
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| Pork chops and snow peas with mushrooms. |
Recent Reading Failures
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| I’m finding it hard to follow this book, which varies from one location, from one set of characters, from one mindset, and then switches to another place, time, person, scene. When I began reading Tokarcuk’s Flights, it was a relief to read well-formed sentences and well-thought-out phrases, no stupid analogies (see next book)! But then I bogged down and only read half. |
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| Free book from amazon.com. It stinks. Bad writing, bad characterization, bad in every way. I tried hard but only read around 30%, |
And a hoped-for reading success…
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| An insanely long book (over 700 pages), but maybe I’ll read it all. |
Blog post © 2026 mae sander
Wednesday, January 07, 2026
Good and Evil
“Enshittification is when you combine the banality of evil with an internet-connected device and a federal law that criminalizes doing anything with that device that the manufacturer dislikes.” (p 141)
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| Why “everything” got worse — easy answer: in this book, “everything” pretty much adds up to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, the iPhone, and maybe Google. |
Does Cory Doctorow have a life outside of the online world? He probably does. However, you wouldn’t know it from this book, despite a brief acknowledgement of the mess the US is in because of our hideous administration in Washington. The book is a weird read because it’s so devoid of what I would call real life. Does the man ever eat? Read fiction? Go for a walk? I understand that every book has to have a focus, but this book reaches a lot of conclusions based on a kind of hyper-focus that makes it seem distorted.
Here’s a summary of what he means by everything: “We are living through a Great Enshittening. Somehow, humans have unleashed the Enshittocene, in which all of our artifacts and hyperobjects are turning into piles of shit.” (p. 55)
Ok, there’s occasional mention of history:
“Never let anyone tell you that the Luddites were afraid of technology or angry about ‘progress.’ That’s a lie propagated by history’s winners, whose great fortunes required oceans of blood from child laborers, murdered protesters, and enslaved Africans in the ‘New World’ who provided the cotton for their machines.” (p. 196)
The book is a dense read: in fact, I had to read the first half of it twice. There’s a lot of real information about the very recent history of technology. But the author considerably overstates the claim that he covers everything. In fact, as I said, it’s hyperfocused.
UPDATE: Cory Doctorow’s summary of the current state of the main points of the book, in case you want the abbreviated version:
Stuff from Real Life: Good and Evil
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| New table and chairs in my little House at Pooh Corner. NOTE: Of course I know that’s Paddington, not Pooh. But Pooh built a house (at Pooh Corner) and Paddington didn’t have a house of his own. So it’s the HOUSE that I named, not the bear. Bears are generous and share with one another.  The house Pooh built for Eeyore. |
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| Renewed effort to go to the fitness center. |
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| New recipe: Len’s Shrimp Curry Dinner. |
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| There’s always something to try at Trader Joe’s. |
HEADLINES FROM RECENT NEWS
Rubio Tells Lawmakers Trump Wants to Buy Greenland
President Trump has said since his first term that he wants to acquire Greenland, and he asked aides for an updated plan on Monday. European leaders reject the president’s assertions.
Trump administration halts more than $10bn for childcare and family assistance
Democrats condemn move in California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, calling it ‘vindictive’ and ‘cruel
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| We have had some snow but not excessive! |
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| Dreaming of Paris which is snow-covered this week. |
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| It’s always good to think about penguins! |
Blog post copyright 2025 mae sander
Sunday, January 04, 2026
Weekend
Coffee, Wine …
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| We tried a new coffee shop in Saline, Michigan, down the road from Ann Arbor. It’s Ok, not great. |
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| The coffee cups are upbeat. |
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| Street art in Saline across from the cafe. |
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| Jam omelet at home |
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Reading
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| Free book from amazon.com I hated it. Not remotely up to this author’s other books. It’s smarmy and preachy. |
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| Probably my next book. |
History Article in the Guardian
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| Putting the new mayor and his political party in historic context is interesting. It’s more interesting to me because one of the currently-living people mentioned is someone I knew. |
Photos © 2026 mae
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