Miami Beach, The Tempest, Letters of Note, Travel Posters & More: Endnotes 20 August

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.

The lifeguard tower above looks like an ’80s dance party, no? It’s found on South Beach in Miami, Florida — of course. Designed by William Lane Architect, this tower and five others are a playful combination of Art Deco details, the local Cracker Style, and the neon-plus-pastel colors of South Florida. Feast your eyes on more candy-colored photos.

• Heck yeah, Science Daily! Picking up a book for fun positively affects verbal abilities.

• Song lyrics are poetry, and I got curious about the words and backstory of Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper.’ The internet delivered in glorious fashion. The band’s lead guitarist Buck Dharma described it as ‘a love song where the love transcends the actual physical existence of the partners.’

• Great news for fans of A Tale for the Time Being. Author Ruth Ozeki’s new novel The Book of Form and Emptiness will be out 21 September. It sounds like her signature blend of magic and emotion, and it’s available for pre-order now!

• 45 Abandoned Places Around the World That Are Eerily Beautiful.

• Neat! The Culture Trip is going to start offering real-life, small group adventures.

• I’m currently reading a novel that’s a riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This BBC guide to the play was enormously helpful (and fun!).

• David and I got completely sucked into the story of the TV series The White Lotus. A bunch of troubled guests at a Hawaiian resort with an upstairs-downstairs relationship with the staff? YES, PLEASE. Here’s a roundup of all the books read by the characters on the show.

• The free Letters of Note newsletter delivers famous notes from history to your email inbox. Always compelling, often inspiring, and sometimes packed with surprise feels.

• This is a fascinating dive into why Victorian women jumped at the chance to go to sea. ‘When merchant vessels like RMS Britannia began carrying female passengers, it was considered desirable to have a woman crew member on board, so that “proprieties could be observed,” and so women were afforded new opportunities in the maritime trade — opportunities that allowed them to travel.’

• Books in translation are a special kind of alchemy. The task of translating is loaded with responsibilities and pleasures. ‘Translation comes with a unique form of responsibility. If I screw up this essay, I will only have misrepresented myself. If I screw up a translation, I will have misrepresented the author, which is perhaps less frightening than exposing myself as a whiny impostor but strikes me as a much bigger ethical failure.’

• Sometimes, you just need a dose of Edward Gorey’s unique brand of fun:

• In 1928, a barber named I.A. Persinger started to collect Wash Tubbs comics in a scrapbook, inviting his patrons to add their own comments to the pages. It’s now a charming 36-pound chronicle of the Great Depression.

• These early 1900s travel posters by British artist John Hassall are pretty cute.

• National Geographic makes a splash with this ode to American swimming pools. The photos and story are top-notch.

• Say Cheese! How bad photography has changed our definition of good pictures. Such an interesting look at how photos are a combination of technology and humanity.

• BRB, just gonna go hang out with a book on an Art Nouveau balcony in Budapest.

May you find your own little hideaway for some quiet reading time.

Top image courtesy of Luc Bélanger/Unsplash.