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.
Rejoice! Strawberries are in season or will be soon in much of the world. We recently watched this video about sandwiches from around the globe, and Dave was smitten with the strawberry-and-whipped-cream sandwich from Japan. Here’s a good how-to post if you want to try it yourself. Strawberries are at all the markets in Prague right now. They’re sweet and delicious, but they are notoriously finicky and want to be eaten pretty much immediately. Here are 3 simple methods for storing strawberries, in case your strawberries are jerks, too. Finally, strawberries don’t only have to be dessert. Check out this video of strawberry dishes from around the world; I might try the strawberry sambol from Indonesia this weekend! Here’s a simple recipe.
Prepare to swoon: The new season of Bridgerton started yesterday on Netflix. Enjoy this behind-the-scenes peek at the sets — or book a getaway to a Georgian-mansion-turned hotel to live like Penelope Featherington.
The Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide is out! Anne Bogel’s book picks are always top-notch — everything you need to know about the Guide is right here.
If you’re anywhere near North Carolina, you might want to get tickets for the Theatre Raleigh production of Jane Eyre: The Musical, starring Broadway performers Julie Benko and Matt Bogart.
Sicily sold homes for one euro. This is what happened next. The first three paragraphs of this article are chef’s kiss.
Mystery solved! This Is Why Flight Attendants Sit on Their Hands During Takeoff.
This is fun: The Booker Prize teamed up with The Notting Hill Bookshop (yes, that one!) to put a spotlight on fiction in translation. (Here’s my list of 27 great books in translation.)
Based on this clip, I feel like Sarah Jessica Parker would enjoy our podcast?
If you’re trying to learn a foreign language, here are helpful tips for becoming an amateur polyglot.
These sculptures based on doodles are a delight to see — and their story is quite poignant. ‘When visiting his hometown of Runik, Kosovo, back in 2010, Petrit Halilaj realized that his elementary school was being demolished. He went to the site—which had miraculously survived the Yugoslav wars that spurred his family to flee to an Albanian refugee camp in 1998—and found a pile of desks, many with doodles and notes scratched into their surfaces. These etchings have now found their way to New York, where they’re perched atop The Met’s rooftop garden…’ Here’s a video interview with the artist.
Treat yourself to this gallery of finalists for the Wanderlust Travel Photo of the Year.
I’m a superfan of Natasha Pulley’s novels (The Bedlam Stacks, The Kingdoms, The Half Life of Valery K), so I’m inclined to trust her recommendations for the 5 best sci-fi romance novels.
This marriage of classic novels and rich paint colors is pretty cool.
I keep crossing paths with articles about the novel The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. It sounds great! Esquire weighs in on why we love time-travel fiction — and here’s the author explaining why writing her book was so much fun.
The Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, recently showed an exhibit called Holbein and the Renaissance of the North. There’s an excellent interactive piece online exploring paintings and other objects from 16th-century Europe.
Tangentially related: Last week, I mentioned t-shirts emblazoned with women authors’ names. I noticed that Hilary Mantel was missing from the store, so I wrote them and asked them to consider adding her. It worked! You can now get a t-shirt or sweatshirt to shout-out Dame Hilary.
Since we launched Strong Sense of Place in 2020, we’ve produced five seasons — 56 episodes — of the show. We’ve also shared our love for books through 101 episodes of The Library of Lost Time podcast — and we’ve introduced to 500 books we love.
Thanks to you, we’ve had over one million downloads (!) and, the best part of all, we feel like we’re part of a massive book club filled with the best people. Thank you for that!
In this mini-episode, we each looked back through our book recommendations to find our top 10 titles from the first fives seasons of the show. Maybe you’ll find your new favorites, too! [transcript]
Dave’s Top 10
Mel’s Top 10
Top image courtesy of Angèle Kamp/Unsplash.
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