Best Beaches, Bread+Books, Summer Skies, Suitcase Poetry & More: Endnotes 07 July

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 colorful umbrellas and chairs above are found on the beach in Phuket, Thailand. (For a virtual trip to Thailand, treat yourself to our podcast episode Thailand: Come for the Food, Stay for the Spiritual Enlightenment). If your thoughts are turning to sand, surf, and sun, here are The Guardian’s picks for the best 50 beaches, Condé Nast Traveler’s favorite 29, and Time Out’s top 31.

• Good Book/Good Bread is a twice-a-month newsletter that pairs an excellent book with a delicious bread recipe. Two tasty places to start: Demon Copperhead and sourdough muffins or Sea of Tranquility and maple milk bread.

• 20 Best Tennis Books to Read This Summer.

• Take a peek inside one of the last pencil factories in America. The family-owned facility in Shelbyville, Tennessee — ‘The Pencil City’ — produces more than 70 million pencils annually.

• The Italian kitchen brand Officine Gullo built a new showroom for its stoves and kitchen gadgets inside a deconsecrated chapel in Florence. It is stunning.

• I’ve been getting such good podcast recommendations from the free newsletter Hurt Your Brain. The author Erik Jones aims to recommend podcasts that ‘change your mind about something or really broaden your perspective on how the world works.’ His writing is conversational, and his picks are solid — we were thrilled to find Strong Sense of Place among his recommendations in this edition of his newsletter.

• Forever on #TeamHermen:

• Writing is hard; being a published author might be harder. Tom Rachman — author of The Imperfectionists and his new novel The Imposters — explains how ‘promoting a book can derange you.’

• Just in case you need to see a handsome British actor lounging in a library and enjoying beautiful stationery.

• Atlas Obscura invited nine readers to share their favorite stories about the summer night sky. The results are really nice.

• Pssst… it’s us, over there. Expats.cz, a news website for expats here in Prague, did a profile on Strong Sense of Place.

• Four Popular Mystery Tropes and Why We Love Them. ‘Let’s do a brief deep dive into these 4 popular tropes—the four legs of the trope table. Maybe we can solve the mystery behind why writers keep writing them—and why readers keep reading them.’

• Ever been tempted to steal an art masterpiece? Here’s some advice from the world’s greatest art thief.

• Sorta related: Enjoy this thread that argues Edward Hopper is the greatest American artist.

• This is one of the best essays I’ve read in a while: What Suitcases Taught Ana Menéndez About Art, Exile, and Poetry. ‘… you can tell a lot about yourself by what you’d pack when you know you won’t be returning.’ (And now I want to read Menéndez’s new novel The Apartment.

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 Only One Left by Riley Sager and The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel. Then Dave shares the amazing story of the gilded age socialite Ida Wood. [transcript]

Links

• The Only One Left by Riley Sager.

• Visit Riley Sager’s website and Instagram.

• Riley talked about his book in this video from The Poisoned Pen bookshop.

• Smithsonian magazine: Why 19th-Century Axe Murderer Lizzie Borden Was Found Not Guilty.

• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel.

• Our podcast episode Maine: Lighthouses, Lobster Rolls, and the King of Horror.

• The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel.

• Smithsonian magazine on Ida Wood: Everything Was Fake but Her Wealth.

• Wikipedia entires for Ida Wood and her husband Benjamin Wood.

• A personal essay: My Crazy Aunt Ida.

Wherever you find your body, may you be in a beachy state of mind.

Top image courtesy of Bubbers BB/Shutterstock.