Slovenia, the Origin of Weird, Photo Booths, Dark Academia & More: Endnotes 04 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.

That pretty little Baroque church above is Church of the Holy Spirit near the village of Podolševa in northern Slovenia, close to the Austrian border. The village is the highest settlement in Slovenia (at around 4300 feet/1300 meters). This is old country; settlements in the area date back to the 13th century. The church was first mentioned in written documents in 1631, and it houses the oldest bell in the area, inscribed with ancient Gothic lettering. It’s easier to get there now than in the old (old) days: The Solčava Panoramic Route is a 23-mile (37km) route you can travel by car, bicycle, or foot that’s marked with 20 waypoints to enjoy the vistas and valleys. There are high mountain farms where you can spend the night and eat delicious local specialties, like meat dumplings, mushroom soup, venison goulash, and prekmurska gibanica, a cake with layers made with poppies, shredded apple, and crushed walnuts, served warm. While in Slovenia, you’ll also want to visit the atmospheric capital city of Ljubljana and Lake Bled, which we talked about previously here and here.

• I’m not sure that I’ll actually do it, but I daydream about wild swimming — in Ireland, in Copenhagen, in Spain. Until then, here are 9 memoirs abut wild swimming.

• Graphic novels are a great way to bridge the gap between page-turning beach reads and the atmosphere of Spooky Season. These 7 graphic novels build stories from fragments, including collage, photography, and other handmade techniques.

• Are you one of the many fans of the novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi? Good news! He’s now publishing on Substack!

• Last call for our Patreon-based slow read of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova — it starts this weekend! You can find all the details you need to join right here. In addition to the thoroughly transporting story, you’ll instantly have about 90 new bookish friends. Our Patrons are the nicest readers around!

• Weird is a weird word. ‘We say weird all the time for the little everyday oddities we encounter. But weird wasn’t always such a casual word. A thousand years ago, it was one of the heaviest words in the English language: the ancestor of weird was the Old English word wyrd, which meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny.’ (Hence, the Weird Sisters of Macbeth.)

• Whelp, I definitely wish I had one of these tiny books. Here’s how the artist made it.

• ‘Close the curtain, strike a pose, and collect your photos here.’ The Art of Photo Booths. This is a really fun story, and here’s my favorite fact: The inventor of the modern photo booth, Anatol Josepho, was paid $1 million by the Photomaton Company; they planned to place the booths across America. Josepho ‘pledged to put half of the original million in a trust for charity and use the other half to support other inventors.’ If you don’t feel like reading the essay, at least treat yourself to the dozens of photo strip pics.

• I clicked on this so quickly! Volunteer to care for cats on the Aegean Island of Syros. They provide bed, brunch, and utilities in exchange for about six hours per day, five days a week. On a Greek island with lots of cats!

• Well, this is a whale of a museum. (Sorry.) ‘Opening in 2027, The Whale will explore the science, behavior, evolution and cultural history of whales through art, storytelling, sound and architecture.’ The architectural drawings are stunning; it looks like a whale’s fluke.

• Sorta related: Wildlife Photographer of the Year finalists.

• Slow Horses is back! Plus classic literary adaptations to watch in September.

• On the Entrancing Moral Quandaries of Dark Academia. ‘Unlike us, the protagonists of dark academia are not locked out of the elite power structures. Their admittance to the institution is a disruption to the status quo, allowing us to imagine access to everything we lack. But the appeal of dark academia isn’t solely this glimpse of wealth and power, though that matters. More so, these narratives offer the opportunity to feel simultaneously included in that world and superior to it, the paradoxical pleasure of hating the upper class while being one of them.’

• A great, new-to-me BookTuber:

• 23 Questions with Marlon James. ‘I love being edited if I think my editor is smarter than me. And I have a very, very, very smart editor, and the thing is, I listen, I trust. I rarely fight an editor on something because the thing about a good editor is that they don’t actually tell you what to write. They can recognize that a sentence, a paragraph, a story needs fixing, but the good editors don’t tell you how to fix it. But they won’t let it go until it’s fixed.’

• A book I’m excited to read: Playing Wolf by Zuzana Říhová. A Czech couple with a shaky marriage move from Prague to a remote village for a fresh start. The locals are unwelcoming, and two days after their son goes missing, they discover the villagers in festive costumes, gathered outside their cottage. Described as ‘elegant horror novel for fans of Midsommar and The Witch.’ Read a sample.

• Anne Bogel — the brains and beauty behind the What Should I Read Next podcast — has great taste and is an Emily St. John Mandel completist, which makes her the perfect person to write Where to start with Emily St. John Mandel.

May your transition into Spooky Season be filled with tea and atmospheric stories.

Top image courtesy of Aydin Hassan/Unsplash.