How to process such bounty …

Not sure if it’s a tryptophan hangover, but this whole holiday thing has got me feeling a little behind, unable to catch up. And it seems there’s no shortage of quality reads vying for my attention online. Maybe you can relate?

Here then, for selfish purposes as much as sharing with our readers, is a made-for-bookmarking catchall of interesting reads you can enjoy today, tomorrow, or even sometime next year.

— From the Financial Times: Let There Be Light

The story of the Book of Kells, of the mystery surrounding its provenance and the anonymity of the master scribes and artists who executed it, is a splendid romance. Few emblems of medieval European civilisation have caught the imagination of the international public to the same degree. Every year tens of thousands of visitors to Dublin file through the Long Room of Trinity College to view its intricately decorated pages. The artistry, colour, exuberance and wit that went into the making of this illuminated version of the four Gospels, described in the 11th-century Annals of Ulster as “primh-mind iarthair domain”, “the most precious object of the western world”, are an enduring source of awe and admiration. Here is a spark of brilliant light shining for us out of the Dark Ages.

— From The Last Word on Nothing: Re-Awakenings

When it followed her to college, she blamed it on stress. She was working so hard, she told herself, her body just needed the extra rest. But it was more than that. She would chose naps over eating lunch, working out, or being with friends. Every night after dinner, she came back to her dorm room to sleep. If her parents called on those evenings, her roommate would cover for her, telling them she had gone to the library.

After graduation, Sumner moved to Bangkok to teach English. Her sleeping continued, and so did her rationalizations. It was OK that she was napping between every class because she was adjusting to a warm climate. Then she spent a winter working in London. There, her excuse was the dark and dreary sky.

— From the Los Angeles Review of Books: A Three Act Journey in the Land of the Screenwriting Gurus

LONG AGO, IN A TIME OF PEACE and relative innocence, I decided that I would like, very much, to be a writer. At that time, I was just a person who wrote stuff; a swell hobby and a fine way to pass the time while everyone else worked, but what I really wanted was to get paid to write stuff. Besides the obvious fiduciary benefits of such an arrangement, I was most interested in the title it confers. “Writer” would provide identity and security. “Person who writes stuff” provided only stomach pains.

— From the Guardian: Mary Shelley on the Origins of Frankenstein

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.

— From the Ploughshares blog: Redacted: Experiences with Digital Americana’s Interactive Literary Magazine

There has always been somewhat of an unrealized promise of interactivity with digital literature. It should be more than an enhanced experience of the print original, but still reflect the intentions of the artists. The Electronic Literature movement has tried to legitimize and broadcast new formats from a variety of different artists and authors that expand the experience of literature. Authors of interactive fiction and alternative reality games have also taken the idea of story to a more immersive and interactive level.  While these art forms are supported by a vibrant and active community, there the perennial question on monetization and distribution.

— From PANK: “Drag” a short story by Lauren Ellen Scott

Bonnie, Jack, and Tal take the whole case out to the dock behind the bay house, lay down under the moon and drink. The wood beneath them smells like old blood because it is soaked in old blood.

A dog they don’t know starts pounding up the dock, stops when he gets close enough to notice them. It’s a big yellow lab, balls intact. The dog slips over the side as if he’d rather not explain himself. He swims away towards the moon’s reflection on the rippled surface of the water.

Bonnie has a line out, baited with a strip of squid. The rod is in a piece of white plastic pipe bolted to the dock. She won’t catch anything.

— From Vanity Fair: Capote’s Swan Dive

‘Have you seen Esquire?! Call me as soon as you’re finished,” New York society doyenne Babe Paley asked her friend Slim Keith over the telephone when the November 1975 issue hit the stands. Keith, then living at the Pierre hotel, sent the maid downstairs for a copy. “I read it, and I was absolutely horrified,” she later confided to the writer George Plimpton. “The story about the sheets, the story about Ann Woodward . . . There was no question in anybody’s mind who it was.”

The story they were reading in Esquire was “La Côte Basque 1965,” but it wasn’t so much a story as an atomic bomb that Truman Capote built all by himself in his U.N. Plaza apartment and at his beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island. It was the first installment of Answered Prayers, the novel that Truman believed would be his masterpiece.

— From McSweeney’s: “Buzzard Wing Wish” a short story by Brian Allen Carr

Theodore dressed in yellow and he couldn’t spell his name. He knew his birthday, and he could hum some Prokofiev, and he could hard boil eggs, and he had seen where the gold was buried. I dragged him into the desert, and we chased the sun west. Our feet trudged against the dunes, the plateaus red columns in the deep left distance.

“I don’t know,” said Theodore, “I can’t be certain.”

“You’ll know it,” I told him. “I’ve got faith in you.”

— From the Rumpus: Here is New York

My mother spent her twenties and thirties in New York City during the volatile time before the 1990s. Before Bloomberg, before Giuliani. Before the most recent waves of gentrification sent glass towers for the wealthy up through the Lower East Side and along the waterfront in Williamsburg. Before the new, clean Times Square. Before safe subways and before walking home, alone, drunk, through any part of Manhattan late at night felt just fine. She lived there back when fear was still the price the city exacted for allowing you to call it home. It was the city that President Ford told to “Drop Dead,” the city in which Patti Smith was young and broke, long before she declared New York “over,” and urged everyone to pack up and move to Detroit.

— From the Virginia Quarterly Review: Stephen Burt’s “My Life as a Girl”

Maybe I just want to be pretty.

Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.

— From Bookslut: A World in Which It Is Impossible to Sleep

I’m a New York insomniac, but here in the Nepal Himalayas I sleep peacefully, from 7:30 pm to 4:30 am. I don’t dream, or maybe I dream a little. I watch the dawn alone every morning, and I don’t miss anyone, and I think it’s all the singing, screaming birds that make me feel so peaceful, or it’s the huge mountains, or it’s the low sound of conch horns and drumming from the monastery in the valley, or it’s that this is what mornings are like, or it’s that this is what my body is like, designed to be peaceful, designed for breathing and for sleeping and for waking up.

— From Esquire: A Golden Age for Writers

Writers have always been whiners. For nearly a hundred years, since at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the death of the novel has been presaged. And now, egged on by BuzzFeed and video games and just general hypercaffeinated, e-mail-all-the-time ADHD, the book is apparently, finally, about to die. At least we’ll have good stuff to read while we wait. This fall alone, the number of big books published by major writers is astounding: Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and about a half dozen others. Not that the list has stopped anyone from complaining. Literary circles have been so full of pity for so long that they can’t accept the optimistic truth: We’re living in a golden age for writers and writing.

— From More Intelligent Life: The Odessaphiles

Perhaps it’s the influence of his stories, with their subtle narrators and exquisite understatement, but to me the smiles on Isaac Babel’s face in the black-and-white photographs in the Odessa State Literary Museum all seem ironic. It’s hard, too, knowing a little about his life and how it ended, not to suspect that one of the ironies Babel might have been contemplating was the transience of success, even the violence that might one day supersede the accolades the Stalinist state had heaped upon him. Looking at the wiry spectacles pinned to the wall, I think of the pair that must have perched on the pale, fragile dome of Babel’s head when the secret police took him to the Lubyanka.