Afternoon Bus Tour of Slea Head Drive, Dingel Peninsula

 

Gallarus Oratory, Dingel Peninsula. This stone building, called a rubble monastery, is about 1300 years old. Settlements near the building were destroyed by later Viking and Norman invaders.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Skellig MIchael and Little Skellig Islands

 

A huge number of gannets breed on these two tiny islands near Ireland.

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

 Tradition

Our Saint Patrick’s Day dinner in 2026. Our red cabbage was a raw salad, and the corned beef came in a
package already sliced, which may be a little off the traditional meal. We ate it the evening before the holiday.

Here is the online summary of this tradition: “Corned beef and cabbage is considered an Irish-American dish, not traditionally Irish. While Irish immigrants brought the tradition of eating boiled meat and cabbage to the U.S., they substituted expensive Irish bacon with cheaper corned beef purchased from Jewish butchers in New York City during the 19th century.”

Corned beef and green cabbage from the past. 

Ireland

St. Patrick’s Day near Galway a few years ago (photo from Arny).

The best meal we had in Ireland in 2011 was a plate of fresh oysters in a restaurant near Galway.

An Irish rainbow

The tomb of the poet William Butler Yeats.

Dublin, 2011

A statue of Molly Malone (of the very sad song).

The castle.

School children playing in a park.

Photos © 2017-2025 mae sander

Sally Rooney

“Peter is refilling their glasses now, and the server is bringing their main courses to the table. Ivan has ordered the salmon: a glistening pink fillet topped with delicate dissolving flakes of salt, surrounded by buttered green peas and asparagus and baby potatoes. … In his mouth, the salmon melts hot into an abstraction of flavour: salt savoury fish and the bright sparkling taste of lemon juice, melting together on the palate. It is extremely flavourful, Ivan thinks, extremely good to eat” (Intermezzo, p. 156)

That’s how Sally Rooney describes food. Vividly, but not very originally. It’s also how she writes sex scenes — vividly but not very originally. These scenes are numerous in the book Intermezzo. Maybe too numerous and a bit overdone. My thoughts on the book as a whole involve the way I feel about her character development.

People who think of themselves as complicated, and who try to impress others with their complexity and with how interesting it makes them, have always annoyed me. Ultimately, I think these “complicated” people are boring. At least that’s been true in my experience (though the trend is more pronounced in people much younger than I, so I haven’t been involved with it recently). Well, I have to face it. All the characters in Sally Rooney’s book Intermezzo are exactly this type of self-conscious “complicated” people who in my opinion aren’t really that interesting.

After I wrote this paragraph, I read an article in the New York Times called “Sally Rooney is the Least Interesting thing about her Novels” which said:

”Sally Rooney is not an interesting person. She’ll tell you this herself — recently, in an interview with The New York Times for her new novel, ‘Intermezzo,’ she replied to a question about her hobbies with: ‘What do I like to do? I feel like I’m so uninteresting.’”

The article makes the point that you shouldn’t presume that the characters in a novel are really versions of the author herself (the book is pointedly talking about women authors). This isn’t news to me — I spent years trying to convince my former book club that we shouldn’t think that way. I can see how the book tempts people to view the characters as more real than fictional because of the writing style: maybe being too vivid creates an illusion that you aren’t in a fictional world. I feel as if there’s a lack of distance.

Intermezzo is about two brothers, Peter and Ivan, and their girlfriends. Peter is in his mid-thirties. One of his two girlfriends is around 23; the other one is his age, and has been in his life since they were in college. Ivan is (sort of ) in college, and his girl friend is in her mid-thirties. Each character worries about why they are attracted to someone so different in age. The three in the triangle worry about being judged for that. And they all worry that their friends and acquaintances will judge them for having a relationship that’s age-unbalanced. After a while, I got tired of hearing about the age hang-ups from all five main characters. They spend too much energy on what other people think.

Peter and Ivan have a very strained fraternal relationship. A key scene in the book is a quarrel between them that leaves them estranged for several weeks. They think about everything in their relationship going back to childhood as very complicated. Peter was much older, and Ivan looked up to him but didn’t get all the attention he wanted from him. Their parents split up when Ivan was very small, and they had to live with their mother and her boyfriend sometimes. Their father had died a week before the novel’s beginning. (It’s a conventional novel with events in chronological order and flashbacks or memories as needed.) Both are mourning him and are feeling a sort of rivalry about who was closest to him, who had done the most for him. Neither of them is close to the mother at the time of the novel. Does this make them complicated and interesting? Well, in my opinion, not really.

Peter is depressive. He drinks too much and takes lots of prescription pills to help his moods. He obsesses about this that and the other thing. He can’t decide which girlfriend he loves better because he loves both of them. All the other characters are very patient and forbearing with him, including his mother. That is, until Ivan gets mad. Does this make him interesting. Unfortunately, no. And with Ivan, it’s similar, though he also worries about winning chess tournaments as well as about his love affair.

Intermezzo is a very well written and readable book, but its two main characters aren’t really likable, especially Peter. The women are described in less emotional detail than the men; they are a bit more likable but they are overshadowed, as characters, by the men. The story works, but somehow it seems a little bit hollow.

Sally Rooney is a very popular author, to a much greater extent than I realized when I decided to read her new book. Although I liked it and respected her talents, I suspect I’m not really in sync with her vast fan base. I admire this book, but just didn’t enjoy it the way I sometimes enjoy a novel.

Review © 2024 mae sander

Very Different Books!

 

Everyone seems to be reading Claire Keegan. I read one of her stories a while back, and I’ve been reading this volume of three stories. When I bought it I expected it to be a little longer — it’s only 64 pages. But the stories are good, classic form short stories with a tight unity and clear character portait in each of them. Keegan is a very keen observer of people and both their strengths and their weaknesses. I especially liked the first story, “So Late in the Day,” because it’s about a writer transforming a somewhat unpleasant experience into a tightly written story.

In 2022 a reviewer in the New York Times summarized Keegan’s style: “Keegan’s stories often hinge on the unspoken tensions that fester between neighbors, parents and children, husbands and wives — even as they probe the bigger political and social fault lines in Irish society.” (source)

Thanks to all the recommenders who mentioned this neat Irish author!

Clara Reads Proust was an irresistible title to me — in fact, I pre-ordered it so that I could get it as soon as it became available in English in March. Sad to say, I was disappointed in the artificiality of this novel. I felt as if the author, Stéphane Carlier, had written a school paper about Proust, and then tried to write a novel around his observations. Since tens of thousands of scholarly articles about Proust have been published (in fact there are MANY indexes and collections to this enormous body of works, estimated to be more than 30,000 in number) I guess this was an easier way to have his insights get a bit of attention. Though of course this author is well-known and successful in France, having written many novels, this one is the first to be translated into English and the last one I’ll probably read in any language.

The title character, Clara, is a hairdresser working in an obscure salon at the back of an passageway in a provincial French city. She happens to find a copy of the first novel in Proust’s famous multi-volume series In Search of Lost Time (sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past, French title À la recherche du temps perdu). 

Clara reads the book. It totally speaks to her. She understands it all, especially the famous passage about Proust’s taste memory as he dips a madeleine into his tea (a scene about which I bet 10,000 scholarly and popular articles and books have been written, with more being written every year). She goes on reading the later books in the series.

I think there are several assumptions about the reader of Clara Reads Proust. This hypothetical reader is familiar with Proust’s work, at least the first volume, if for no other reason than having read bits of it in school. This reader thinks Proust is fabulous and terribly deep and hard to understand. And this reader will now be convinced that Proust’s accomplishment is marvelously simple though profound, because it’s all clear to Clara who intuitively grasps Proust’s meaning and greatness. The greatness of Proust’s book — which the reader now understands —  can and does change Clara’s life.

I don’t buy any of it. End of review.

As I often find when reading a novel by Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), this novel is enchanting, and hard to describe. Originally published in Japan in 1950, The Rainbow was just translated into English for the first time last year. It features three daughters of a successful architect. Each of them had a different mothers, and only one of the three mothers was married to their father. In this story, set in the difficult years just after World War II, the daughters are just discovering themselves as women. Their father has complex feelings towards them and towards the memory of their mothers.

Each daughter is dealing with her feelings about her own mother, as well as about the relationships of their father with these three women, who have all died before the beginning of the novel. One of the daughters had a fiancé who died in the war; the others have fraught love relationships as well. The nuances of their feelings for each other, for their father, and for their love interests are all penetratingly described. 

The setting is mainly in the beautiful and historic city of Kyoto with its famous Buddhist temples, gardens, and monuments. One scene particularly seemed striking to me: a visit to the Imperial Palace and gardens at Katsura near Tokyo, which was then and continues to be a masterpiece of Japanese classical architecture. Every detail of the tour is described with incredible vividness and economic use of language. It’s beautiful but hard to explain what makes this book so brilliant.

Kawabata received the Nobel Prize in 1968. He wrote many novels and short stories, and is known as an innovative leader in Japanese twentieth century literature.

Evoking my Experiences

All three of these books are especially interesting to me because the locales where they take place are very significant, and as it happens, I’m familiar with at least some of the places and types of places that the authors describe. I have visited Kyoto, including several of the famous Temples and the Katsura Imperial Palace. I have visited Dublin: for example, I have seen the statue of Oscar Wilde in the park where a scene in one story takes place. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time in France so the local color is familiar to me. I didn’t choose these books for this familiarity — maybe they chose me.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Shamrocks at our local garden store.

At Trader Joe’s: shamrocks wrapped up for St. Patrick’s Day.

Shamrocks that we saw in Ireland.

On St. Patrick's Day I love to think about the times we have traveled in Ireland. Our trips have always been centered in Galway because my brother has spent several sabbatical years working at the university there, so we were there at least four times. We managed to visit Dublin, the Rock of Cashel, and a few other places as well. I've posted some of these photos before, but it's been a while so here they are again!

Children playing in a park in Dublin.

The Rock of Cashel, “The High King of Irish Monuments.”

Ironwork on a bridge in Galway.

Ashford Castle.

A crafts center near Galway with an interestingly painted building.

A mural on an outdoor cafe in downtown Galway.

The bar at Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Coole for Elizabeth’s celebration of drinks.

Note: As far as I've been able to discover, there's no green beer in Ireland for St. Patrick's Day or any other time. Green beer is strictly American and was invented in New York in 1914. So no pics here! (source)

Photos © 2000-2024, mae sander

Shared with Sami’s Monday Murals

Watching TV and Reading Two New Books with a Sense of Place

What I watched this week

Biden made Speaker Johnson squirm!

Photos from the New York Times

Reading

I’ve been reading two very recently published books by two authors I like: Tommy Orange and Tana French. While the two books are very different in most respects, I have been struck by how each of them is permeated by a sense of place and by a community in this place. The Native American community in Oakland, California is the focus for Tommy Orange. A rural hamlet in the wilds of Ireland is the focus for Tana French. Both authors have written about these communities in previous books as well, and I looked forward to reading these sequels. Although each book is about much more than one topic, I’ve concentrated on the sense of place in each one.

The Hunter by Tana French

Tana French: The Hunter 
(published March 5, 2024)

This is a huge book with lots of rambling descriptions of the small community of Ardnakelty in a backwoods area in County Mayo, Ireland. As a reader, you either have to be very patient or very tolerant of long descriptive passages to enjoy these colorful passages for themselves alone, rather than as prologue to any suspense that the author might decide to build. You have to enjoy the slow portrayal of a bunch of individualists with a huge back story and relationships and rivalries going back to their school days and even to their grandparents. You have to enjoy finding out which ones know and tell all the gossip and which ones can keep it to themselves. You have to empathize with the Irish people who find a dry summer heatwave unfamiliar and agonizing: and it lasts until almost the final chapter of the book.

In this mix is Cal, a stranger, a former Chicago policeman, who has lived in the town for two years and was featured along with the rest of them in the earlier novel, The Searcher. And the central character is Trey, who is fifteen and trying to control her chaotic environment.

While one expects a Tana French novel to be some sort of murder mystery, no murder happens until halfway through: it’s all personalities and an emerging story of a possible con by a recently-returned native son and how he winds up the locals who have never left. As one of the characters says: “I’ve been local all my life.” (p. 244) They know each other well: another character explains, when asked to identify the accent of some unknown men: “Ardnakelty. Even just over the other side of the mountain, or across the river, they talk different. These were from round here.” (p. 302) And when there’s finally a murder and a detective he turns out to be a Dubliner — and you should hear what they say about Dubliners.

The main characters’ faithful dogs have a major role in depicting life in rural Ardnakelty.
I found these photos of some of the famous Irish dog breeds, though the dogs in the story are mutts.

Two dogs show up on the first page, and accompany their two masters, the local girl Trey and the American ex-pat Cal, throughout the book. Dogs are an integral part of community life in Ardnakelty. Just about every important character in the book also has at least one dog, and the dogs relate to one another in a kind of mirror to their people. Right from the start we learn about Trey and Cal’s two dogs:

 

“Her dog Banjo lollops in wide circles off the path, snuffing and burrowing among the thick heather, which is too brown-edged and heavily scented for July. … Every few minutes he comes bounding back to tell Trey, with small happy puffs and moans, what he’s found. Banjo is a mutt, black and tan, with a beagle’s head and body set on the legs of something stubbier, and he’s a lot more talkative than Trey is. He got his name from a banjo-shaped patch of white on his belly. … Cal Hooper, the American who lives down near the village, has Banjo’s litter-mate and named him Rip, and if a plain name is good enough for Cal’s dog, it’s good enough for Trey’s. Besides, she spends much of her waking time at Cal’s place, meaning the two dogs spend much of their time together, and it would sound stupid if they didn’t match.” (p. 1)

Trey — in her relationship to Banjo and to Cal and with the rest of the characters — is a perplexing teenage mystery to those around her, especially Cal and Lena, a local woman who is Cal’s romantic partner. They constantly — maybe repetitively — react to her combination of insight and immaturity:

“He can’t be sure, any more, what she’s capable of. When he thought she had none of the artifice other teenagers develop, he was wrong again. She’s just been saving it, and tailoring it, for when it matters.” (p. 313)

“Lena spent the whole drive looking for the right way to go about this, but all she found was the looming, intractable sense that she’s out of her depth. Someone else should be doing this, Noreen or Cal or someone who has a bull’s notion of how to deal with teenagers; anyone but her.” (p. 406)

While I enjoyed the local color, the relationships among the characters, and the build-up of events, ultimately I found The Hunter to be disappointing. All in all, it was too rambling and too long. While it didn’t exactly lack focus, it also didn’t exactly stay focused either. For much of the novel, the plot centers on two men who intend to trick a number of local people out of a lot of money through a get-rich-quick scheme, but then this con falls apart, and the focus changes. Much of the plot depends on knowing the ending of the previous novel, and the main revelation (which I can’t say because it would be a spoiler) is in my view kind of a let-down. The novel, in my interpretation, turns out  not to be a police procedural or a detective story at all: more of a social history. As the New York Times reviewer says: “The secretive village is a trope as old as mysteries — as old as humanity itself.” (link)

Ireland is always a focus for American celebration,
especially Saint Patrick’s Day which is coming up soon.
My neighbors already have their holiday banner up.

 Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

“Walking around Lake Merritt you see all kinds of people in Oakland, the hipster, the homeless, the homeless hipster, the mixtape mixed-race CD-pushing rapper, the serious runners and the casual runners, the joggers, the stoners, the casual blunt smokers, the power walkers, the slow walkers that talk endlessly, the stroller pushers, and then just so many young people with blankets on the grass. It didn’t used to be like this around the lake, people always walked it, but now it is a kind of scene, with food trucks in tow.” (Wandering Stars, p. 184)

Tommy Orange’s new book has much more history than his earlier book There, There. In the early chapters it goes back much further to the lives of the Native American ancestors of the modern residents of Oakland who were in There, There. These predecessors were above all survivors, who managed to dodge the official efforts to exterminate the Indians, and who evaded annihilation in a variety of determined ways. In Tommy Orange’s view: “all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.” (p. 102)

Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars 
(published February 27, 2024)

Oakland became the home of Native Americans who were victims of the vicious Indian schools that deprived children of their heritage in the early twentieth century — including the ancestors of the main character of the book: a teenage boy who is being raised by his two grandmothers, Opal and Jacquie (as they are viewed by Native Americans; actually they are sisters and one is literally his grandmother). Oakland played a role in the way Opal thought about meeting his grandfather. In her mind, she relives this:

“You will think he is white or part white but he will recognize you as Indian and ask where you’re from. The question will throw you at first, because you’re from Oakland, so you want to say you’re from here, but you don’t know what here means for a moment, did it mean modern times, did it mean Oakland, did it mean America? And where would you be from if you were a real Indian? Oklahoma? You will know that’s not true, that Indians were from every single corner of the country—beyond the country. You will have read about hundreds of tribes, each with their own languages and customs and creation stories.” (p. 113)

As the reviewer in the Washington Post expressed it: “As ‘Wandering Stars’ sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is. But then, about halfway through the novel, we arrive in 2018, more than 150 years after the Sand Creek massacre. Here, Orange flares his wings and touches down for good in the home of Orvil Red Feather, the teenager wounded at the climax of ‘There There.’” (link)

 Now Oakland is the center of life in the novel, and appears in many of their thoughts. For an adopted dark-skinned child of rich parents, who befriends Orvil:

“Anyone’s skin color in a place like Oakland, that could be okay, that could be nothing to mention, normal even, but Oakland had a lotta sides to it. And it had these hills, these Oakland hills, as they were called in code, meaning not the flatlands, meaning not the east, meaning there was money up there, real estate value, multimillion-dollar views of Oakland.”

For Orvil, aware of being a child of several generations of Oakland Native Americans, the local neighborhoods in the poorer part of town were critical:

“The neighborhood is not that deep into East Oakland, but not near Lake Merritt either, a kind of central East Oakland sometimes called the middle extent, because most of Oakland is East Oakland, but to tell anyone where they live in Oakland, if asked, they might just say they live in the Dimond.” (p. 157)

Opal and Jacquie, the grandmothers, have many memories; for example a conversation about the Mormon temple in Oakland:

“You remember Mom used to tell us the Mormon temple was Disneyland?” 

“She told us a lot we knew not to believe,” 

Opal says. “You didn’t believe her?” 

Jacquie says. “I did. Enough that I looked it up later. You know Walt Disney got his inspiration from Fairyland way back when? And Frank Oz, who was one of the other main Muppet guys, he came out of Fairyland too? All that magic in the world, that came from Oakland.” (p. 187) 

The main character, the young boy Orvil, has a lot of promise. The two grandmothers have high aspirations for him. But circumstances lead him to become addicted first to painkillers and then to worse. It’s sad, but at the end. he describes his painful path to recovery, creating his identity, and eventually can go back to Oakland. 

“I was all about being from Oakland and being Native and feeling like I belonged to something older than the country. Opal never talked about the people who first lived in Oakland. And I hadn’t thought to look it up.” (p. 296)

Update March 16: For a really comprehensive review and interview with the author see the Guardian article titled “Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has has problems with addiction, including myself.’”

 

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Dogs dedicated to Eileen’s critter post.

Books, Bakes, and Netflix

The sky has been beautiful this week!

Reading

"Foster," a novella by Irish writer Claire Keegan is narrated by a child trying to understand what's happening when her father drops her off in an unfamiliar family for several weeks. Poor kid never quite gets what is going on. You, the reader, can almost guess. At the start:

"She leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me. We walk through into the heat of the kitchen where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking there’s some disinfectant, some bleach. She lifts a rhubarb tart out of the oven and puts it on the bench to cool: syrup on the point of bubbling over, thin leaves of pastry baked into the crust. A cool draught from the door blows in, but here it is hot and still and clean. Tall ox-eyed daisies are still as the tall glass of water they are standing in." (Foster p. 8).

Mystery Reading List

Beginning to run out of ideas on what to read, I was happy to see a Washington Post article titled: "The 10 best mystery novels of 2023: Richard Osman, Brendan Slocumb and Elly Griffiths are among the authors who kept us happily guessing whodunnit this year." I've read and liked three of the ten selections. I'm not crazy about The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp but I might try one or two more from this list to see if there are some good new ideas.

One of the Washington Post's 10 best mysteries of the year so far.

Leonie Swann is a pseudonymn for some German writer whose real identity seems unknown. The internet seems to have virtually no information about this author. I can't find any real reviews of The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp. I wonder how it ended up on the Washington Post list. 

I find this novel mildly offensive because of its very ugly ideas about elderly people and how brain-dead they are, and how they try to overcome their miserable mental and physical decline. The characters int he book rarely walk: they hobble or dodder or stumble. Their minds are foggy. Maybe some readers find this funny, or at least think elderly people are a fair target for insensitive humor. I don't find it so. 

It's true that each chapter has the name of a very typical British food, and that this food plays a role in the chapter. Chelsea Buns, Cottage Pie, Curry, Victoria Sponge, Scones, Bangers and Mash, Biscuits, Gin and Tonic and on and on. But this isn't the Great British Baking Show. This foodie stuff isn't enough to make me like the book. In fact, it's sort of mechanical and annoying.

The murder-mystery plot is not terrible, but not great either, and the ending is contrived. Maybe it's supposed to be some kind of farce or satire. Not very successful...I don't recommend it.

Two Books on Bread

The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question 1700-1775 (published 1996) and Good Bread is Back (published 2005) by Steven Laurence Kaplan: two very scholarly and excruciatingly detailed books about bread. Topics include the history of bread in France, its social implications, economic consequences, controversies over acceptable ingredients and techniques, technical baking details, and more. These books focus on the 18th and 20th century. I found them tough reading, and didn't really read every bit carefully. But if you want to know about French bread, I think Kaplan is really the world expert and there will never be another.

Actual Bread in Our Kitchen

Reading about French bread inspired a bake from the famous Poilâne book...

Len's beautiful and delicious Poilâne loaf.

New Netflix Series

In eight episodes, this animated series follows a wandering samurai (or ronin) in ancient Japan has all kinds of adventures on a quest to find their father. The art work is fabulous, with echoes or even direct copying of Japanese woodblocks and other art works. The adventures are a bit predictable, but the beauty of the scenes and the use of Japanese themes kept me watching. In fact, I will probably watch Season 2 if it doesn't descend into too much repetition. Definitely adult content! Not for prudes or the faint of heart!

Reviews © 2023 mae sander

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

At the Giants Causeway, March 2011. This mysterious rock formation was made by the
giant Finn McCool of Ireland. (Or if you prefer, by volcanic activity)
One of many places we have visited with Arny and Tracy on our visits with them in Ireland.

On several trips to Ireland, I've come to love the green beauty of the Irish landscape and also to appreciate the cuisine, which is not in the least dominated by corned beef and cabbage or by potatoes. These are the American cliches about Irish food! Here are some photos that I have posted before, to celebrate Ireland.

Clonmacnoise National Historic Site, County Offaly, Ireland.

Opening an oyster at Moran's Oyster Cottage at Coole near the estate made famous
by William Butler Yeats. We've been there several times.

Lemon tart at a restaurant in Galway.

Swans near Moran’s Oyster House, reminding me of the Yeats poem “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

”But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful”

Irish sheep in 2016.

Ancient Dolmen at the Burren near Galway, 2005

"Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross." -- W.B.Yeats

Photos © 2005-2023 mae sander