Little India, Turkish Delight, Living in 'Gothic Times' & More: Endnotes 26 March

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 cheerful, rainbow-colored facade above is found in Little India, one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in Singapore. It’s the former home of Tan Teng Niah, a Chinese businessman who owned candy factories nearby. The surrounding community mixes Hindu and Chinese temples with mosques and churches, all nestled up alongside food stalls, open-air shopping, artists spaces, and so many Indian restaurants along Serangoon Road and Race Course Road. For more, check out this walking tour from Visit Singapore.

• Make your very important choices in the Washington Post bracket to pick the best fictional detective.

• Gimme all the corsets and alluring glances, please. Then take me to these 10 PBS Masterpiece locations in England.

• Sort of related: The 30 Best British TV Shows You Need to Binge This Year. Many, many of them are based on great books.

• We can all agree that vacations and traveling are fun. But it’s more than that! Here are 6 things science tells us about travel and creativity.

• How well do you know these famous literary destinations? This was a tough quiz; I got 13/20.

• UK artist Dinny Pocock makes these adorable needle-felt sculptures. You can follow her on Instagram for more adorableness.

• Whoa! This is a 9-page collection of the covers of American women’s dime novels. So dishy!

• I’ve mentioned before that David and I have been binge-watching the reality show Below Deck. Just in time for planning our post-pandemic yacht cruise (daydreaming is fun!), CNN Traveler shared the best private yacht charters for small groups.

• Author Elizabeth Brooks shared a playlist (and commentary) on Largehearted Boy to go along with her Gothic novel The Whispering House… atmospheric listening and reading.

• Culture Trip has the fuel for your imagination with 19 incredible places you never knew existed in Europe.

• Calling all fans of golden age mysteries and crossword puzzles: The new episode of the Shedunnit podcast is for you.

• The new actor playing Poirot is quite a looker:

• BBC Culture examines why these are Gothic times. ‘If the 1970s (think the oil crisis, Watergate, a spike in “skyjackings”) primed readers to be receptive to such elements, it was a decade destined to be far outdone by the start of the 21st Century in terms of horror and upheaval (9/11, the global financial crisis, an intensified fear of climate apocalypse). The world seems to have grown only more uncertain in the years since, and it’s certainly tough to rival the age of Covid for gothic motifs made manifest. Claustrophobia? Try successive lockdowns spent working, learning, and socializing from home. Isolation? Ditto.’

• In 1929, Lady Grace Drummond-Hay was the first woman to fly around the world on a zeppelin.

• The sweet behind-the-scenes story of Turkish delight.

• Another reason to check your attic: Priest holes.

• You need to know about José Epita Mbomo, the Spanish electrician who sabotaged the Nazis.

• Let this short video of the turquoise waters of Vietnam’s Lan Ha Bay soothe you.

Wishing you just the right balance of excitement and peacefulness.

Top image courtesy of Bule Sky Studio/Shutterstock.