Kathmandu, Dorian Gray, CA Redwoods, New Modern Gothic Novels & More: Endnotes 17 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.

The colorful flags above adorn the Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. In Buddhist tradition, the stupa symbolizes peace and tranquility, a three-dimensional reminder of Buddha’s path to enlightenment. The first stupa on this spot was built sometime after was built sometime after 600 CE, when Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetan King, converted to Buddhism. According to legend, he commissioned the stupa as an act of penance after unwittingly killing his father (!). The original structure was destroyed by Mughal invaders in the 14th century. This particular stupa is of newer construction — and for centuries, it’s been a resting spot for Tibetan traders to offer prayers on their journeys along an ancient trade route from Tibet to Lalitpur, one of the largest cities in Nepa. Lonely Planet has more about Boudhanath — and here’s a pretty stunning panorama view of the stupa. Plus, 10 reasons to visit Nepal in 2025.

• Edward Gorey seems like such a lovely collision of style, art, and attitude. I mean, these envelope drawings. Delightful!

• Neat! A free online course from the University of Edinburgh: How to Read a Novel. Videos, reading, and discussion prompts consider plot, characterization, dialogue, and setting.

• Kind of related: This deep-dive into Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with the Rosenbach looks awesome. I participated in their previous course on Jane Eyre and loved it. (All of the Sundays with Jane Eyre lectures are still available free online.)

• I love this! Scent Makes a Place. ‘[W]hen I go outside and try to smell the air, identify the plant, find the source of aromatic joy, I’m engaging in an uphill battle, fighting both my culture and my exhausted, chemical-addled olfactory bulbs. Yet it’s a wildly worthwhile thing, to immerse oneself in a landscape, and savoring the scents of place is a crucial element of this process.’

• Are you a fan of Gothic literature? 5 Most Iconic Locations in the UK. Gimme all the gloomy castles, abandoned ruins, and wild moorlands.

• Let’s keep the Gothic train rolling: 9 Books Combining The Gothic & The Glamorous. So many new-to-me titles!

• I 100% agree with this headline. No notes. Can Slow Horses Please Give River a Love Interest?.

• I haven’t watched the new season of The Traitors yet, but I devoured the previous US and UK versions. (Claudia Winkleman is my fashion queen.) This is a fun list: 8 of the best Booker-nominated books for fans of The Traitors.

• Erika Swyler’s novel The Book of Speculation — which includes two librarians, a tarot card reader, a traveling circus, mermaids, dark secrets, a family curse, and an antiquarian book — is one of my all-time favorites. Her new book We Lived on the Horizon dropped this week, and she put together a playlist to go along.

• Must-click headline for me: If The Golden Globes Outfits Were Books.

• Friend-of-SSoP Addie Broyles is a wonderful writer: warm, inquisitive, descriptive, and delightful. Her new essay on visiting California’s Avenue of the Giants is no exception. ‘We first saw these trees after our long drive up the Highway 1. We’d been on curvy roads for hours, so it was surreal to step out under the canopy of these giant trees stretching toward the sky. It was raining softly when we pulled into the tiny parking lot. The trees dwarfed everything. We walked quietly on the brown duff that had fallen from limbs hundreds of feet above us and found trees we couldn’t encircle even if all four of us held hands.’

• The BBC compiled a pretty sweet list of the 25 best places to travel in 2025. We’ve done podcast episodes on many of them: Japan, Newfoundland and Labrador, Sri Lanka, Panama, Morocco, Hawaii, and Norway.

• You’re invited to share your favorite three reads of 2024 with our bookish pals at Shepherd.com! Just click this link to submit the best three books you read last year — here are mine! Your recommendation will join this epic best-of list.

Wishing you happy travels in 2025!

Top image courtesy of Arjoon Basnet/Unsplash.