Let’s all pause for the collective groan that is Monday.

Feel better? Maybe some book stuff will help.

First, hop over to Bitter Empire and check out my review of a sweet little book called George’s Grand Tour. The book is about George, eighty-three, and his “young” neighbor Charles, seventy-six, who decide to road trip the route of the Tour de France.

And if that isn’t enough, here are some interesting links I have been collecting.

  • What’s the Point of Handwriting? (via LitHub). From the article: “Unlike digital’s precision, writing is blurry individuality under a general system. But in addition to this, we all have our own personalized understanding of arrows, squiggles, double-underlines and so on—little personal codes we develop over time to ‘talk to ourselves.’ To write by hand is to always foreground an inevitable uniqueness, visually marking out an identity in opposition to, say, this font you’re reading right now.” Now that’s an interesting twist! Giving up handwriting for digital text is giving up something that is unique to each of us. Don’t give away your individuality, grab a pen and start writing!

  • Gods and Goddesses help us all, The Millions has a list of the Most Anticipated books of the second half of 2015. Readers, get your TBR lists ready, you’ll be adding gobs of books to it.

  • Before you put your TBR list away, take a look at Neglected Books Revisited, Part 1 at American Scholar. It being a part one implies there will soon be a part two!

  • And while you are adding books, might as well check out a list by novelist Sophie McManus of 7 Great Books Born from “Catastrophes”. Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill leads the list and I can attest to it being a pretty great book.

  • On the futility of writing (and writing in spite of it all) (via LitHub). From the article: “Were I ever to be asked for a writing tip, something born out of this experience would be my choice: walk into any gigantic bookshop and think whether you can face being one more name lost in this desert of words. If that ideal situation proves too much to bear do something else with your time (it is of course highly likely that if you go around asking for writing tips you will never make it on print).” And, might I add, if you are that kind of person, you probably imagine your book will be displayed on a front table as a bestseller.

  • In The World’s Descent Steve King notes that Harold Bloom turned 85 on July 11th and compares what Bloom believes reading should be with what a few other scholarly types are saying these days. I am not a fan of Bloom’s dogmatism and his anti-feminist rants, but nonetheless I respect the man. How can I not respect someone who cares so deeply about literature even if I disagree with him on a number of things?

  • Nicola Griffith writes The Women You Didn’t See: A Letter to Alice Sheldon. You may know Alice Sheldon better under her pen name, James Tiptree, Jr. It’s a lovely, sad letter.

There you are. I hope at least one of them will go a little way to help Monday be not quite so bad.