Tea in Lit, International Lipreading, Drawing Room Drama & More: Endnotes 28 February

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

That breathtaking vista above is the view of Kilimanjaro from Amboseli National Park in Kenya. The park is one of the best places on the planet to see free-ranging elephants, as well as Cape buffalo, impala, lions, cheetahs, spotted hyenas, Masai giraffes, Grant’s zebras, and blue wildebeests. The local tribespeople are the Maasai, and the name ‘Amboseli’ comes from a Maasai word meaning ‘salty dust.’ But the park includes various habitats, including wetlands with sulfur springs, savannah, woodlands, and the dried bed of Lake Amboseli. But mostly: elephants! {more}

• I didn’t know I needed Taco Bell poetry, and then there it was. There’s a literary magazine devoted to Taco Bell?! You can download a free PDF of the first issue!

• If life were like fiction, every drawing room would be a hotbed of batting eyelashes and arsenic-spiked teapots. Country Life magazine delves into the history of the country house drawing room IRL.

• Lonely Planet asks (and answers): Is jet lag worse when flying east or west? (Trick question. It’s awful both ways.)

• I fell down the rabbit hole of investigating the stage sets for the play An Inspector Calls. You’ll find a gallery of very cool photos at this link. A film version of the play is available online, should you also catch the curiosity bug.

• Brew a cup of tea and enjoy this list of novels that feature a fine cuppa.

• Photographer Greg Lecoeur won Underwater Photographer of the Year for his photo of playful seals called Frozen Mobile Home. The rest of the photos are also very arresting.

• Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile was released this week (and as soon as I finish my current read, I’m digging in). In this piece in The Week, Larson lists the books he keeps returning to, and in this Q&A at LitHub, he talks about writing his new book.

• In other Big Author news: Hilary Mantel is the author of Wolf Hall, and the much-anticipated final installment in her trilogy The Mirror and the Light is out on 5 March. But you can read and listen to an excerpt right now. (If you really want to dive into all things Hilary Mantel (as I did), there’s more at The Guardian and The New York Times.

• This short video showing how suitcases are made is mesmerizing and oddly cheerful.

• The Glacier Express train connects the Swiss mountain towns of Zermatt and St. Moritz. It looks just about perfect.

• What Is the hardest language in the world to lipread?

• Bookish podcast of the week: This week, we celebrated the birthday of artist and writer Edward Gorey on our blog. In this episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, we learn more about the life of the fabulous Mr. Gorey. Spoiler: He was not a grim grumpus. (Skip to 1:22 if you want to avoid ads and un-related chit-chat.)

• Travel podcast of the week: The Life on Safari podcast seems to have stopped production, but the episodes that do exist are excellent. This one is fascinating: a conversation with Kane Motswana, a Bushman from northern Botswana. His family members were nomadic hunter-gatherers, and now, he’s one of the best safari guides in Africa.

• It’s us, over there: The Geopats podcast is about important things like coffee, books, and podcasting. In episode 114, David and I were delighted to talk to the host Stephanie about our favorite bookshops in Prague, and two special books that played an important role in our relationship.

Wishing you a cup of tea that’s the perfect temperature and an irresistible book to go along.

Top image courtesy of Sergey Pesterev.