Field Museum, Beinecke Library, Dark Academia, RomComs & More: Endnotes 19 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’s the Field Museum up there, a stunning natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois. You might recall that we discussed the World’s Columbian Exposition in the Chicago episode of our podast. Held in 1893, it showcased technology, art, architecture, and cultures from all around the world. When the exhibition closed, 50,000 items from the fair were used to begin the Field Museum. It’s now home to more than 24 million objects, including gems, fossils, meteorites, taxidermy, and cultural artifacts — plus a library devoted to biology, geology, archaeology, and ethnology. The Field produces a video series called The Brain Scoop that shares the museum’s work and research. We also urge you to watch this charming video of a T-Rex visiting Sue, the T-Rex fossil in Stanley Field Hall.

• Who could resist this headline: No, Beinecke Library is not specially designed to suffocate humans in the event of a fire.

• Quiz: How to say ‘hello’ around the world. I got 21/25.

• L.A.-based mural artist Bunnie Reiss incorporates imagery from her Eastern European heritage into her colorful, whimsical works. Read all about the mural she painted on the four-story Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit, and follow her on Twitter.

• This essay on LitHub is an intelligent, thoughtful look at point of view in fiction. ‘Sometimes the author and the reader form their own band of brothers, watching the character coolly from afar, giggling or gaping at him, judging his foibles, watching him fumble. Sometimes the author shows you the world so completely from the character’s perspective that you pretty much forget the author is even there. It seems that you and the character are alone together at the empty diner after closing time, bathed in spotlights as in a Hopper painting.’

• Here’s a guide to novels that satisfy a craving for Dark Academia.

• The best staycation in every US state.

• Edward Carey, the author of the novel Little (recommended in our Paris podcast episode) and the new book The Swallowed Man, has been doing a drawing a day during quarantine. He never expected to create a gallery of hundreds of pictures, but they sure are sweet illustrations.

• Deanna Raybourn, author of the much-beloved Veronica Speedwell novels, shared tasty tidbits about Dame Agatha Christie on Twitter. Click through for the delightful thread in its entirety.

• These two articles about happenings in San Francisco were both fantastic reads: Meet a German tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco, then meet a 107-year-old San Franciscan who survived the 1918 flu pandemic and scaled the Golden Gate Bridge while it was under construction.

• Amor Towles, author of A Gentleman in Moscow (which we love) and The Rules of Civility, has a new novel coming in October!

• Travel back in time to 1913 and take a virtual tour of the SS Imperator, a German ocean liner built for the Hamburg America Line.

• This RomCom Movie Bracket is a lot of fun, and many of the titles started their lives as books.

• Enjoy this delicious story and photos of dumplings in the Republic of Georgia.

• Could not be more excited about a live-action adaptation of an Edward Gorey book. Especially when the images look like this:

• Accidentally Wes Anderson has a new website. As you might expect, it’s very pleasing to the eye.

• Goths! New Wavers! Psychobillies! In 1989 Dublin!

• Bookish podcast of the week: The Poetry Off The Shelf podcast explores contemporary poetry via readings by poets, interviews with critics, and short poetry documentaries. In this episode, producer Helena de Groot introduces us to Texas poet and activist Lewis Macadams.

• Travel podcast of the week: Desert Island Dips is a podcast dedicated to condiments and their backstories. In this episode, the hosts discuss Mojo, a delicious sauce that’s a staple of the Canary Islands.

Wishing you all the time you need to read.

Top image courtesy of Field Museum.