Hannukkah, NPR Best Books, Em-Dash Love, Glacier Express Train & More: Endnotes 03 December

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.

Hanukkah (also Chanukah) is an eight-day Jewish celebration that means dedication in Hebrew. Often called the Festival of Lights, it’s commemorated by lighting the candles on a menorah, traditional food, gifts, and games. This year, Hanukkah began on 28 November and ends on 06 December. In this photo, people in Israel light candles during a Hanukkah celebration. Here are more photos of beautiful menorahs from around the world — and here’s more detail on Hanukkah and its history.

• One of our favorite holiday traditions: NPR’s book picks for the year. (I can attest that the cookbook Eat, Habibi, Eat! is excellent, as is the novel The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I just finished it; it blew my mind, broke my heart, then stitched it up again.)

• Related: Here’s a Q&A with Louise Erdrich about her new book.

• The Glacier Express is an eight-hour Alpine train route — protected by UNESCO! — that travels through the snowy wonderland between the Swiss towns of Zermatt and St. Moritz. ‘For more than 90 years, the Glacier Express has invited guests to glide through Valais, Uri, and Graubünden, skimming over 291 bridges and needling through 91 tunnels as they go. Bookended by the Matterhorn and Piz Bernina, it passes through world-class scenery: the Rhône Glacier, the vertiginous Oberalp Pass, the curvaceous Landwasser Viaduct, and the Rhine Gorge - the Grand Canyon of Switzerland.’

• These illustrations from the 1844 book Un Autre Monde stole my heart.

• I’m not really a games-on-my-phone person, but I’ve been playing Wordle once a day, and it’s so good! One word, five letters, hard thinking. It’s a delight.

• The US Library of Congress has collected all of the videos from this year’s National Book Festival in one place. So much good stuff! So handy!

• The Ashmolean Museum created an online advent calendar that features one work from the collection each day. Lovely!

• These are very, very cool photos of New York City as you’ve never seen it before.

• It snowed in Haworth; click through to see a video:

• Phew. This is really good writing: A Review Of Turning 30 During The Pandemic (It’s Bad).

• Belle da Costa Greene was the librarian for J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian from 1905 until he died in 1913. We wrote about her here — and the podcast Book Dreams has a conversation with the authors of the novel The Personal Librarian, a fictional account of Greene’s life.

• Literature Cambridge is offering a series of lectures devoted to Jane Austen’s novels. Each session focuses on one title — Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasian, Pride and Prejudice — with a live online lecture/seminar with a Cambridge scholar, once a month, from January to April at 6:00 p.m British time. Get all the details.

• #TeamEmDash4Ever:

• For those of us working from home and craving the cringe of an office holiday party, here are 10 great movie Christmas parties. CrimeReads makes a case for why the party in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the best one.

• Commas matter, people.

Wishing you peace, comfort, joy, cookies, merriment, tea, and cozy blankets.

Top image courtesy of David Cohen 156/Shutterstock.