IF YOU WANT a juicy longread to sink your teeth into, you’ve come to the right place.

Here are three to save for a moment of peace, or devour straight away.

• Travels through North America

Karl Ove Knausgaard follows the mythical path of the Vikings, but things don’t go quite to plan. Just sink into his wonderful prose.

[New York Times - 54 mins]

Small ice-covered lakes lay scattered here and there, many of them free of snow, probably because the winds coming off the ocean swept them bare. But not a house, not a boat, no sign of life anywhere. Normally, I would have been excited. I love desolate landscapes. But now I was somehow distracted.

• My secret life

Security guard Marko Petrovich has seen it all in his job at a Portland library – here are the odd yet fascinating details. [Boing Boing - 12 mins]

There might be drugs slipped between the life stories of Fredrick Douglass and Stephen A. Douglas, and the orange carpeting seems to call to people looking for a nap or even sex, Petrovich says, lowering his voice to a whisper.

• So smart

IQ might be rising in parts of the world, but are we REALLY smarter than our grandparents? Here’s the data.

[BBC- 14 mins]

If Americans today took the tests from a century ago, Flynn says, they would have an extraordinarily high average IQ of 130. And if the Americans of 100 years ago took today’s tests, they would have an average IQ of 70 – the recognised cut-off for people with intellectual disabilities. To put it another way, IQ has been rising at roughly three points per decade.