Spring Tulips, Booker List, Romcom Essays, Travel Movies & More: Endnotes 14 April

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.

From mid-April to early May, the tulip fields in The Netherlands are an explosion of colorful blooms. The Dutch countryside is sprinkled like confetti with bright petals. Noordwijkerhout (great for biking), Lisse (fields of beautiful rainbow stripes), Keukenhof (a park with more than 6 million flowers), and Amsterdam are among the most popular places to see these purple, pink, red, yellow, and orange blossoms. Get flower-peeping travel tips from Culture Trip and Afar Magazine.

• My essay for the Meet Cute Missives essay project is live: Elinor Lipman is the New E.M. Forster. Fight Me. ‘If my ’90s bookshelf was a person, it would have been a pale, emo-leaning girl with a predilection for black eyeliner, stompy boots, and big feelings. But sprinkled among those stories of suspense and heartbreak were the sparkly, pastel-colored novels of Elinor Lipman.’

• This is so cool! The Smithsonian has digitized a book of 19th-century silhouette portraits, and you can search for your family’s name. The story of how the book came to be is fascinating, and the silhouettes have a lot of charm.

• Take this quiz to find out which book from the International Booker Prize 2023 longlist you should read first. I got Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel.

• From now until August, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, has an exhibit of 60 works called All Consuming: Art and the Essence of Food. It explores ‘how artists responded to and shaped food cultures in Europe from 1500 to 1900’ through the themes of Hunger, Excess, and Sustenance. Tasty!

• Thrillers + Turkey? Yes, please. CrimeReads recommends 7 Espionage Movies Filmed in Istanbul.

• Lots of good reminders and helpful tips in this article about how your phone is ruining your vacation. ‘It’s an obvious point that checking your work emails when you’re supposed to be off sucks. What’s perhaps not so obvious is that posting to Instagram when you’re on a boat floating by a glacier in Patagonia kind of does, too.’

• Enjoy a little Shakespeare with this review of the book Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine by Sophie Duncan. The book delves into the legacy of Juliet Capulet, the ultimate romantic heroine.

• So… our David Humphreys has an ancestor named David Humphreys, and he — the other one — wrote a letter to George Washington in 1786.

• Buckle up for armchair travel! Here’s a 7-day itinerary for Belgium and the best countryside day trips from London by train.

• Paul Theroux on the tradition of the literary lunch. ‘Long lunches were bonding ceremonies and a form of homage, ideally one o’clock to around four at a good restaurant, starting with a schooner of sherry, ending with a tulip-shaped glass of port, and two or three dishes in between, not including a luscious dessert or an aromatic cheese board. Such meals left me dizzy and thankful. I fainted in the upstairs stacks of the London Library after overdoing it at one of them.’

• An oldie but a goodie on how emojis make writing ‘a lot more like talking.’ Now I want to go study the linguistics of emojis.

• These are billed by CN Traveler as the 39 best travel movies for children, but TBH, I want to watch all of them.

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: The Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox and The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. Then Dave talks about how to help your non-podcast-listening friends become podcast fans. [transcript]

Links

• Hester Fox’s website and Instagram.

• Shannon Chakraborty’s website and Twitter.

• City of Brass by Shannon Chakraborty was featured in our podcast episode Egypt: Ancient Antiquities, Fiery Djinn, and the Lure of the Nile.

• Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown was featured in our podcast episode The Sea: Tales of Poets and Pirates.

• This American Life

• WTF with Marc Maron

• RadioLab

• Shut Up and Sit Down

• Twenty Thousand Hertz

• What Should I Read Next? with Anne Bogel

• The Perks of Being a Book Lover

• Films to be Buried With with Brett Goldstein

• Podchaser

• Realm.fm

• The Library of Lost Time episode: Realm Podcasts & Two New Books

• Tink Media: Adopt-a-Listener

Wishing you a podcast that makes doing laundry feel like fun.

Top image courtesy of Olha Rohulya/Shutterstock.