Endnotes 18 October: Accidentally Wes Anderson, Best BookTube, Yurts, Typhoid Mary, Poetry Jukebox & More

Let's start the weekend with whimsy

Oct 18, 2024

Happy Friday, friends!

I usually put The Library of Lost Time at the bottom of this post, but I’m so excited about our special guests today. They get top billing!

I think you all know by now that I’m a Wes Anderson fan. Anderson’s combination of quirky storytelling and signature (colorful, carefully composed) images is irresistible to me.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of my comfort movies, and I listen to the soundtrack when I’m writing. (It’s playing right now!) The movie combines so many things I love: a murder mystery, a contested will, a manor house haunted by terrible people, a posh hotel that looks like a layer cake, a contested will, Jeff Goldblum, Saoirse Ronan — I’ll stop there, but I could go on.

The founders of Accidentally Wes Anderson — Wally and Amanda Koval — bring a similar affection for imagery and storytelling to their project. Across their website, Instagram, books, puzzles, and postcards, they share delightful images and the quirky stories behind them. The images grab your attention, and/but the writing brings an extra dose of magic dust.

We are thrilled to have Wally and Amanda as our guests on The Library of Lost Time today. They shared a very entertaining (and nostalgic!) Distraction of the Week.

Then, in our chat after recording, they gave us a peek into the making of their new book Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures — including the fact that Jeff Goldblum narrates a good chunk of the audiobook (!). (And then they shared a clip so you can hear a sneak preview of the audiobook.)

Listen to The Library of Lost Time on your favorite app or on our website:
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building covered with red and green ivy leaves with a white wooden door — [photo: Sam Goodgame/Unsplash]

This dreamy doorway — that surely leads to something magical — was photographed in Napa, California. The area is world-renowned for picturesque rolling hills and green valleys dotted with wineries. If wine is your thing, this is the place to go! The grape harvest begins in August; in October and November, the red varieties that will become Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon are picked overnight before sunrise. Wine Enthusiasthas some ideas about the best Merlots in the States.

The town of Yountville is ground zero for California cuisine, including The French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s legendary restaurant (with three Michelin stars). Every day, The French Laundry serves two different nine-course tasting menus, mostly French-influenced and made with local ingredients. Anthony Bourdain called it ‘the best restaurant in the world, period.’ Here’s a first-person account of eating there last fall.

You can also enjoy fantastic food and wine on the Napa Valley Wine Train. Take a ride on a Pullman car for three hours of stunning views and gourmet food — day or night. There’s even a Murder Mystery Dinner!

Need more inspiration? Here are 10 things to do in Napa Valley in the fall.

Inside Hook has ideas about the best BookTube channels — with recommendations for literary fiction, history, mystery, fantasy, romance, and more.

I’m definitely on #TeamJane4Ever, and/but these incorrect Jane Eyrequotes made me laugh.

Do you wish David Tennant would read you some spooky vampire stories? Wish granted.

When we did our podcast episode about Mongolia, I fell in love with the idea of sleeping in a yurt (ger) at least once. Turns out, you can stay in a yurt in Crested Butte, Colorado — and you have to ski or snowshoe to get there!

Must-click headline: My Favorite Spy Stories Are Set in Europe, so I Planned an Espionage-themed Trip Across the Continent. Paris, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest… ‘How wonderful, I thought, that for a few moments, we can all run away to join a circus of our imagination. To travel as if on a mission. To be the main character in our own adventure.’

Speaking of Prague, Václav Havel airport now has a poetry jukebox! It features 20 works, mostly in English, written by important Czech figures and writers, including Havel, Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Karel Čapek (coined the word robot), and more. More details here.

Sort of related: Starting 22 November and running through 13 April 2025, the Morgan Library in New York is putting on a Franz Kafka exhibit. The exhibition will display artifacts from the Bodleian Library, including literary manuscripts, correspondence, personal diaries, and family photographs, including the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis. Other highlights include letters he wrote to his sister Ottla and the notebooks he used to study Hebrew.

Also at the Morgan until May 2025, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy.

Notre Dame in Paris is on the mend. ‘In 2019, a fire nearly destroyed the crown jewel of France—and the nation set a breakneck five-year deadline to bring it back from the ashes. This is the story of how an army of artisans turned back centuries to restore Notre-Dame by hand, and wound up reviving something even greater than the cathedral itself.’

When video games and history meet: the best medieval videogames for history enthusiasts. Fight dragons! Survive the black death! Join the Crusades!

These library education illustrations from the 1930s and ’40s are so cool.

illustration of how a book is tracked in a card catalog — [photo: Charbooth/Flickr]

You probably know Hans Holbein from his iconic Tudor portraits, including Henry VIII. But for Spooky Season, why not explore his The Dance of Death engravings? ‘Noblemen, judges, monks, priests, bishops, kings, aristocrats — Death comes for them all in Holbein’s illustrations… Capricious and mercurial, universal and inevitable — Death, in Holbein’s imagination, is the oblivion that spares no one, regardless of what you have or haven’t done, regardless of who you are.’

Tangentially related: 5 Spooky Small US Towns You Need To Visit.

For Gothic vibes on the other side of the Atlantic, here’s a guide to Yorkshire locations that inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

When I was in an ‘all Anthony Bourdain, all the time’ phase, I read (and loved) his book about Typhoid Mary. No matter what topic he was tackling, he brought dark humor, curiosity, and empathy to the page. A new edition of Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical was recently released: LitHub has an excerpt.

I just added the novels The Plot and The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz to my TBR for November. She shared her favorite books with Elle magazine, and now my TBR has even more. (She won me over with The Inn at Lake Devine which is also one of my all-time favorites.)