Ice Cream, Freeing Nancy Drew, Ghost Towns, Comic Novels, Beirut & More: Endnotes 07 August

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.

We generally include bookshops, libraries, and other literary landmarks in our travel plans, but in the summer, we also keep an eye out for great ice cream. Here are some ideas, if you’d like to combine travel and a cone. The TasteAtlas serves up the 100 most iconic ice creams of the world — and Gelato Festival World Masters has a ranking of international gelato makers. The Guardian taste-tested 99 unusual flavors available in UK stores, and I gotta say, I would love to eat their number one pick: Brown Butter Popcorn. The Vittles newsletter took a deep dive into the sweet history of British ice cream, and the gourmet mag Falstaff looks at four trending ice cream flavors. In the US, you might want to try 7 ice cream shops to build a vacation around — or 16 ice cream shops with seriously unique flavors. Finally, here are the best ice cream shops in every state, and Food and Wine’s picks for the best soft serve shops in America. Pssst… if homemade ice cream is your thing (highly recommended), you will enjoy our guest appearance on this summery episode of the What Should I Read Next podcast in which Dave recommended the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Cookbook. (Should you want to enjoy a cone from the Mr. Whippy truck in the photo above, head to the beachfront in Brighton.)

• Fun! Just learned that ’80s iconic actor John Cusack (my inner teenager will always love The Sure Thing), wrote a graphic novel! He describes it as ‘A wild fusion of theological noir, cosmic satire, and darkly comic Americana in a mind-bending odyssey.’

• 5 Mysteries Set at Literary Events, Conferences, and Retreats.

• The Miss Marple and early Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, and the LA Review of Books asks, Who owns women detectives? The author’s opening paragraph is very relatable: ‘In fifth grade, I brought a stack of Nancy Drew books on a camping trip. I read one a day, hauling them on hikes and finishing them by flashlight in my tent, to my little brother’s annoyance.’

• Aw, this is really nice. Charlotte Brontë is now a mural in Kilkee Beach, Ireland.

• 17 Abandoned Cities Around the World With Eerily Beautiful Ghost Town Architecture. Hand-carved villages! Diamond mines! Posh resorts!

• Ooooh, Chicago has a new club for magic! The Hand & The Eye is Chicago’s spellbinding new magic venue-meets-members’ club. ‘A grand staircase (which took over four months to restore) remains from its casino days, as well as a brick wall from the original mansion. We inherited a building with an incredible provenance of twists and turns and built-in eccentricities.’

• These photographs of a former Soviet mining settlement in Svalbard, Norway, are eerily beautiful. ‘The place has not been abandoned. It has been left in suspension.’

• This is a lovely combination of history, intent, and artistry:

• ‘Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out… And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny.’ Andrew Sean Greer on the joy of funny writing.

• Naomi Alderman is a must-read author for me. Her novels — Disobedience, The Power, The Future — are beautifully written, super smart, insightful, and challenging, but also very entertaining. Here, she offers a ‘couch-to-5k’ for books to get into a solid reading habit. And huzzah! She has a Substack!

• Great writing, lovely photos in this essay My City: Beirut. For more, listen to our podcast episode Lebanon: Surrender to the Call of the Mijwiz.

• If you only click on one thing, make it this! ReadingMaps.com, a website that plots the locations in novels on a world map. Here’s Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE.

May your day be as awesome as a double-scoop that never drips.

Top image courtesy of Jackson Peace/Unsplash.