Grilled Cheese, Grammar Foibles, Shadowology, Celeb Memoirs & More: Endnotes 20 January

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.

We’re feeling gouda because it’s National Cheese Lover’s Day! That’s right! It’s a day dedicated to the celebration of cheese. Did you know there are about 2000 varieties of cheese around the world? Don’t be bleu! We swiss you the best — and we’re not munsters — here are 10 grilled cheese hacks for your best grilled cheese ever. (Is mayo the secret to success?)

• This essay by Andrew Sean Greer is about love, food, family, food-love — all the good stuff — and it includes a recipe for his grandmother’s fried peach pies.

• I’m very excited to read the new novel City Under One Roof — I talked about it in this episode of The Library of Lost Time. Here’s a charming, insightful interview with its author Iris Yamashita.

• Want to read something that will make you laugh out loud and improve your writing skills? Treat yourself to this essay from The New Yorker about grammatical pet peeves. ‘Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. At a health club many years ago, the man on the stair climber next to mine, who knew I was a writer, told me that he despised split infinitives. If I had an opinion about split infinitives at that moment, it was probably that I despised them, too. The man annoyed me, though, so I said, “Oh, I love split infinitives. I use them all the time.” In an article I wrote not long after that, I made sure to use one or two, in case he was checking.’

• On the Women Who Travel podcast: How Other Cultures Care for Their Dead—And What We Can Learn From Them.

• This photo!

• Six Tips for Starting (and Maintaining) a Thriving Book Club.

• New-to-me term: Shadowologist. ‘In my images, I always use the shadow of an everyday object and add a little drawing to turn it into something else.’

• We should send Crime Reads a fruit basket to thank them for this epic list of 100+ mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels coming in 2023.

• Hey, it’s us, over there! Pocket Casts — a pretty awesome podcast app — featured our Strong Sense of Place podcast in this collection of shows to help you learn something new. I found some new favorites: Where There’s a Will: Finding Shakespeare, The History of Literature, and Sidedoor, which goes behind the scenes of the Smithsonian.

• The super-swanky Hudson River Rail Excursions are coming up again. The tickets always sell out in a heartbeat, so if you want to treat yourself, mark your calendar: Tickets are on sale today (!) and 17 February.

• Comic Strips and the OED. ‘The area in which comic strips have made a big impact on the English language, however, is in characterization… H. T. Webster’s meek and timid Caspar Milquetoast gave his name to a class of inoffensive and ineffectual people, while George Baker’s inept World War 2-era soldier the Sad Sack continues to typify inept misfits in the English-speaking world.’

• Spaceship? Magical Egg? Sauna?

• I have mixed feelings about beauty pageants, but I unabashedly love when the Miss Universe contestants showcase their National Costumes. Miss Angola and Miss Cameroon are so fantastic! (And Miss Costa Rica is a giant hummingbird?!)

• This class from My Modern Met looks like a fun way to turn your travel photos into embroidered works of art.

• Esquire weighs in on the best celebrity memoirs of all time.

• When Libro.fm invites you to make a playlist of your favorite audiobooks, you say yes!

• Turns out, Queen Victoria was pretty good at sketching and watercolors. ‘A keen artist from an early age, the Queen made numerous sketches of her homes and family, the places she visited, and the people she met.’

• The HarperCollins Union has been on strike since November 10, 2022. We stand in solidarity with the union. If you want to help, please consider a donation to the strike fund and/or sign up for this newsletter to stay informed about what’s happening.

• 14 of the World’s Top Museum Openings for 2023.

New Episode of The Library of Lost Time

In each mini-podcast episode, we discuss two books at the top of our TBR, then share a fun book- or travel-related distraction. Get all the episodes and books galore here.

In this episode, we get excited about two books: Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey and How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. Then Dave explains why the Tollywood movie RRR is the best action-adventure movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark. [transcript]

Links

• Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey

• Monica Heisey on a perilous trip to Paris.

• Read an excerpt of Really Good, Actually.

• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better by Monica Heisey

• How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

• Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

• My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

• The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

• RRR on Netflix

• The real story of the two freedom fighters in RRR.

• 5 Reasons to Keep RRR on Your Radar.

Be kind.

Top image courtesy of N K/Shutterstock.