CA Poppies, SciFi Librarians, Int'l Sandwiches, Book Fairies & More: Endnotes 21 May

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.

These bright flowers were part of a superbloom along the Diamond Valley Lake Wildflower Trail in California. After spring rains and lots of sunshine, the grasslands around the 3.4-kilometer (2 miles) walking trail turns into a colorful landscape. Orange poppies like these mix with purple and white lupines to make a cheery carpet that looks like a Monet painting sprang into real life.

• Librarians are the best and, generally, are not really shush-ers. Here are Eight Unusual SFF Librarians Who (Probably) Won’t Shush You.

• Who wouldn’t want to visit a library that looks like a cloud?

• Sorry. This quiz on sandwiches from around the world will make you very hungry. Don’t worry! They’ve thoughtfully provided links to recipes. (I got 13/20.)

• This exciting steampunk performance is part of the Bridgewater Carnival in the southwest of England.

• You do not want to miss the Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide. It’s always beautifully designed and packed with excellent reads chosen by Anne Bogel (What Should I Read Next?) herself.

• This organization of Book Fairies is just so great. ‘The Book Fairies are people around the world, sharing the joy of reading by leaving their books in public places to be found by the next reader. Often leaving a note inside, and with our sticker on the outside, the books are then found, read, and then hidden again.’

• Atlas Obscura has announced its amazing line-up of trips for 2022. A culinary tour in Vietnam! Music and mystery in Barcelona! Birds of New Zealand! Even if we can’t go, it’s so much fun to look at all the wonderful details.

• I really enjoyed the short story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” by Sui Sin Far. It’s a sweet comedy-of-manners about a Chinese-American couple in 1912 San Francisco.

• Just a pretty photo of Positano, Italy:

• How to be a terrible, no-good African daughter. ‘It’s Christmas and I am writing the recipe for my favorite food. My mother is cooking the melons, boiling the seeds over the stove to make egusi soup, a red-orange thick stew with a chunky, gritty consistency—or what I, a terrible no-good African daughter with no good cooking skills, mistakenly thought to be African peanut soup.’

• Daniel Mendelsohn (author of the tremendous book The Lost) and Oliver Sears addressed the question ‘Why Talk About the Holocaust?’ Their conversation was so thoughtful and insightful. I attended this fascinating Zoom talk in real-time, and it’s available online. Audio here; video here.

• Travelers in Russia can ride a train through the Ural mountain on the same route taken by some members of the last royal family before their execution in 1918. This short video offers a glimpse of the experience and explains its dark history.

• Emily Dickinson’s books of pressed flowers are very beautiful and inexplicably poignant. You can read about the Herbarium on BrainPickings and flip through all the digitized pages.

• Dare you not to be moved by this National Geographic story about how former foes came together to relocate giraffes from a flooded island to a safe new home. The photos are a delight!

• This is the exhilarating story of how Arni Magnusson preserved Iceland’s literary history. ‘And that is the way of the world. Some men put erroribus (errors) into circulation, and others afterwards try to eradicate those same erroribus. And from this both sorts of men remain busy.’

• My kind of heroines! Outsiders, Eccentrics, and Misfits: A Reading List

• One traveler weighs in on the best UNESCO World Heritage sites.

• Such clever street art:

May you get lost in a great book this weekend.

Top image courtesy of Sergey Shmidt/Unsplash.