LYST 113

Adventure: With Champagne, Delta Wave Music On World Sleep Day, Take A Flower Walk, The Movie Nick Cave Wants You To See This Week and more.

THE WORLD OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

I may have had a close encounter with a Tom Ripley type this week (a story for another time), and then coincidentally stumbled on this book. Patricia Highsmith, the mind behind The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, spent much of her life moving between New York and Europe, gathering the settings and atmospheres that informed her psychologically charged fiction. The World of Patricia Highsmith is a fold-out literary map that traces more than fifty locations tied to her life and work, from Greenwich Village apartments and bars to Paris streets, Italian seaside towns, and the quiet Swiss village where she spent her final years. Along the way, it connects these places to the novels and stories they inspired. It is a compact little curiosity that you could tuck into a suitcase if you felt like following Highsmith’s shadowy trail across a few cities. What a clever concept for a book!

ADVENTURE, WITH CHAMPAGNE

I have become bewitched and besotted with Belmond. It happened while listening to this episode from of one of my favorite podcasts, The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein. Through a conversation with Belmond executive Arnaud Champenois (what a career he has had), the episode explores the legendary restored Art Deco Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. That story alone is worth the listen, as Arnaud describes the design of the meticulously preserved carriages and the rituals of dining, sleeping, and socializing as the train glides across Europe. But Belmond is so much more: a collection of 45 hotels, trains, riverboats, and safari lodges across 20 countries. Imagine taking a train through Peru toward Machu Picchu, visiting the 100-year-old pink Mount Nelson hotel in Cape Town, or traveling from Paris to Florence with a lobster brunch as you roll through the Tuscan hills. Belmond will soon celebrate the centenary of Rio’s Copacabana Palace, and the storied Villa San Michele in Florence remains one of their crown jewels. I will need to win the lottery several times over to experience any of this firsthand, but in the meantime, a girl can dream!.