Wrapping up 2025

Wishing You a Happy New Year and a Look Back at 2025

May, 2025: Alice Graduates from University of Virginia, one of the highlights of the year!

My Kitchen, 2025

January: cooking from Fuchsia Dunlap’s book.

May: our kitchen extends into the back yard, which continued until October.

September: Carol brings us a fruit tart.

December: Chanukah — latkes and salmon.

Christmas dinner at Nat’s house (not my kitchen).

December Celebration

Outstanding Books, 2025

I read and reviewed many books this year, as I enjoy reading and I had time to read. Here are just a few of the ones that I especially liked.

Interesting Places, 2025

We had a great birding trip to Texas in April. Here is a Texas lunch.

One of the many birds we saw in Texas: a Black-Necked Stilt.

On the National Geographic Orion in July, after a tour of Athens,
we visited a number of places in the eastern Mediterranean. Here’s the ship’s kitchen.

After decades of hoping to see the Acropolis, I finally made it to Athens in July.
This is a view from our hotel.

The Dismal State of the Union

Politics this year has been a nightmare, and I’ve avoided any attempt to write about my reaction to the horror show in our nation. However, to wrap up the year I feel I must at least acknowledge how terrified I am that the fundamental philosophy on which the American experiment has rested for 250 years is severely threatened. Here is a summary that seems to capture the situation:

“By any honest accounting, 2025 has been a year of wrecking-ball damage to the constitutional scheme. Our democratic structures are more vulnerable by orders of magnitude than they were at the beginning of the year, before Trump took office. Indeed, one theme historians will likely emphasize is the speed and breadth of Trump 2.0—the way the administration hit the ground running with pre-cooked plans, especially those from Project 2025, to erode the separation of powers.

  

“That unprecedented damage has come from a ruthless and often lawless executive branch, a Congress that has largely declined to act as a co-equal branch, and a Supreme Court that—too often—has been solicitous of presidential power, especially on its emergency docket. The result, at best, is a pockmarked landscape that will require a herculean reclamation project, legally and politically, if constitutional government is to be fully restored.” — Harry Litman, December 29, 2025

Mona Lisa in 2025

Macron announces plans for Mona Lisa.

“The Mona Lisa will be moved to a new exhibition space at the Louvre in Paris as part of a plan to renovate the world's most frequented museum. Emmanuel Macron stood in front of the masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci as he made the announcement to an audience of dignitaries, with the change to be introduced by 2031 and visitors charged separately to see the painting.” (BBC)

 

 In Paris last June (from Alice).

Jean Margat, Mona Lisa collector extraordinaire and creator of this famous
issue of Bizarre Magazine, died in February.

From Andy Borowitz

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Quiet Times, Good Times

Reading

Like many fantasy novels, The Bird King is around one third longer than it should be, as if the author didn’t quite know how to end it. Set in the historic era in Grenada, at the end of the fifteenth century, when the Moors were just being expelled from Spain, the book has a lot of interesting ideas about the relationship of Moslems and Christians at that time. I enjoyed these historic or almost-historic elements of the book. The presence of supernatural creatures was ok until it wasn’t.

This book seems more like a reference work than a readable history.
I read only parts of it. The author has written better books!

High Island Blues is set in the exact locations where we were birding in Texas in April.

This book was a gift from Deb at Readerbuzz, which was wonderful of her! Not only the setting, but the activity of birding and the goals of the characters in High Island Blues are very much like the goals of the birders that we traveled with. Obviously, the major difference is that no one on our tour —that I know of — was motivated to murder anyone. The birding sites named in the novel are the same ones we visited. Two characters in the novel at one point go into Houston to have lunch at the Galleria Shopping Center, which was the location of our hotel at after the tour. As the characters drive through Houston and around the birding areas, I could picture just these places where we drove on our tour.

At one point, we saw an old motel in Winnie, Texas, near the birding sites. This motel was mentioned by name in the novel. We were told that our tour company used to have people stay there, but it has declined in quality. We stayed in a much newer hotel, happily.

The characters in the novel in fact stayed at an old house with a colorful landlady, which I suspect was entirely fictitious, and which enabled the author to create a conventional plot of the English Country House genre, but of course set in Texas. A very successful artistic decision!

As mysteries go, this is a great read. The author has written many successful books, some of which are also TV shows. I’ve loved the “Vera” TV series based on another series of books by the author, Ann Cleeves.

High Island — site of the action in the novel. Our birding trip to Texas in April visited
there, and the experience was just like the description in the book, despite the gap of 30 years.

A Swainson’s Warbler that we saw in Texas when birding in the sites noted in the novel.
Just before finding the body, the key witness was searching for this bird.
(Len’s Photo)

What’s on TV?

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s critters