Fall Foliage, Librarian Sleuths, Haunted Hotels, Grocery Lists & More: Endnotes 20 September

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 photo above was taken on the Charlevoix Crossing (La Traversée de Charlevoix), a long-distance backcountry trail in Québec, Canada. It’s a 65-mile (105km) trail that invites you to hike among the colored leaves. The whole shebang takes about a week, but there’s a more manageable 6-ish-mile (10km) point-to-point hike that’s mostly flat and serves up beautiful views of the St. Lawrence River. For more outdoor fun, here are the best hiking trails in Canada to enjoy fall foliage. Can’t get to Canada this year? Outside Magazine has the scoop on the 9 most underrated US national parks for fall leaves — and Travel+Leisure has opinions about the 22 best places to see fall foliage in the US. This week-long Hudson River fall foliage cruise looks pretty sweet, too. And in case you’re wondering, the BBC explains why trees lose their leaves.

• Very relevant to our interests: Cozy mysteries featuring librarian sleuths.

• Why, yes, I have wondered… how do archivists package things? ‘Archives in movies and TV often have a certain look: a jumble of odd-sized papers and books (mostly books), crammed on shelves and tables. This stuff looks varied and intriguing… But the archivist’s guilty secret is that most stocked archival shelves look comparatively bland: row on row of identical boxes, filled with identical files, and cryptically labeled.’

• Boo! 55 Haunted Hotels Around the World. ‘…from a storied boutique hotel in Manhattan once frequented by Andy Warhol to a permanently docked historic ocean liner haunted by the now-dead crew, to a luxurious Arizona resort occupied by a ghost cowboy. Read on if you dare.’

• This statue of Neptune in Spain is a stunner.

• I sleep in an eye mask and earplugs every night and have long been halfway obsessed with medieval box beds, which are essentially like sleeping inside a cupboard. So I’m very into the idea of this capsule hotel in Amsterdam that’s all box beds.

• Victorian Corsets: Dangerous or Misunderstood?

• Reading books in translation has become one of my favorite reading experiences. And yes! Please, for the love of all that is good, translators’ names belong on the cover alongside the author. This is an interesting essay about the challenges of poetry and translation. ‘While our literary culture remains intent on either dismissing translators as insufficiently masterful or elevating them to something almost author-like — a visibility defined by prizes, awards, and money — mimicry offers a different model of not just authorship but personhood: the mimic is a person infected by the foreign.’

• The Ultimate Fall 2024 Reading List — culled from 27 ‘best of’ lists.

• These tiny plush cats based on medieval illustrations are so freakin’ cute.

• I was recently a guest on the Wonders of the World podcast to talk about the synagogues of Prague, my favorite Czech foods, and why I’m still in love with our adopted city.

• Forget published travel guides, you need to get the password for a Google doc travel guide. ‘The types vary, from Google Maps lists that give a visual perspective into where to find the best spots to a mysterious Microsoft Word Document of Paris recs that’s been passed through so many people, no one knows who first made it.’

• Whelp, this article from National Geographic made me add Armenia to my must-visit list.

• Oooh… take a sneak peek of strangers’ grocery lists.

• Science! Novel vs. novella vs. novelette vs. short story vs. flash fiction.

• The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has an Impressionist exhibit that looks fantastic. Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment runs through 19 January 2025. Featuring great works — 130 of them! — by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Manet, and their contemporaries. Plenty of excellent supporting material is on the exhibit website.

• Look inside the careful, deliberate design of Julia Child’s kitchen. ‘Her kitchens were distinctive but not glamorous or miraculous. Reflecting principles and skills Julia and Paul Child had developed in earlier careers, these were highly rational spaces, rigorously designed by the couple to support the varied activities and lives that played out there.’

• #ChicagoManualofStyle4Ever

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: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison and The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard. Then Dave shares the exploits of the world’s greatest art detective. [transcript]

Links

• Rachel Harrison’s website

• So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

• Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison — hear Mel talk about it

• Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison — hear Dave talk about it

• Cackle by Rachel Harrison

• The Veil audiobook by Rachel Harrison, Louisa Krause (narrator)

• The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard

• Jackie & Me by Louis Brayard

• Courting Mr. Lincoln by Louis Brayard

• The Black Tower by Louis Brayard

• The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Brayard

• Podcast — Detective Agency: Discreet Inquiries, Mysteries Solved

• Arthur Brand’s website and Instagram

• Meet the World’s Greatest Art Detective

• Confessions of an Art Detective

• The Indiana Jones of the Art World

• Hitler’s Horses: The Incredible True Story of the Detective Who Infiltrated the Underworld by Arthur Brand

Parts of the Strong Sense of Place podcast are produced in udio. Some effects are provided by soundly.

May your books be unputdownable.

Top image courtesy of Maridav/Shutterstock.