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Good morning. I bring good news: reading is still sexy. And time might not be real. If you needed any extra motivation to while away an hour with these wonderful stories from around the Guardian this week, consider it a sign.

1. The plot to erase Imran Khan

“There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, alive, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan,” writes Osman Samiuddin. While it’s one thing to remove a PM from office, as happened to the former cricketer in 2022, it’s another to try to eradicate all trace of him, which his government appears to be making all efforts to do. Though with limited success. As Samiuddin notes, “trying to erase Imran might feel like trying to erase the sky”.

A modern epic: A cricket legend, a philanthropist, a politician, the subject of two death hoaxes, and since 2023, an inmate. Khan’s life has been tumultuous and storied – and as this gripping account lays out, inextricably woven with the convulsions of his country.

How long will it take to read: 14 minutes

2. Life in the ‘long middle’ of terminal cancer

Janis Chen has stage four lung cancer. With no cure, but death not necessarily imminent, she has joined the ranks of a new demographic, the “chronically terminal”.

“When you are cured, the world cheers; when you are dying, it mourns. But when you are simply maintaining, the world is at a loss,” she writes. “We are playing in the ‘extra time’ of a match where the whistle refuses to blow, except the scoreboard has long since stopped working.”

How long will it take to read: about 6 minutes

Further reading: “I was asked if there was an ‘everything’ test for cancer,” oncologist and Guardian Australia columnist Ranjana Srivastava wrote this week. “Despite bold claims, no such thing exists.”

3. Sylvia Plath’s juggling act

This glimpse into the poet’s astoundingly productive final year is a vivid, sparkling time capsule. Post-split with Ted Hughes – not long after her second child was born – she was baking cakes, taking classes in three languages, writing an experimental poem for the BBC, hunting obsessively for new carpets and considering woodworking lessons. “My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well,” she wrote to her former psychiatrist.

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“I want my career, my children and a free supple life.” – Sylvia Plath

Split between decades: The complex contradictions between Plath’s almost frenetic domesticity and the way it stifled her held a mirror to her era, suggests Helen Bain. In the same 1962 week she sped through her five “bee sequence” poems, the first Bond film premiered and the Beatles released their first single. The social historian David Kynaston called it the beginning of “the ‘real’ Sixties”.

How long will it take to read: three minutes

4. ‘I’m deathly afraid’: digital spirituality and tech gods

“Something’s wrong, something’s off.” A few months into using ChatGPT to create a record of his life for his young daughter, Jim Pu’u noticed a shift in tone. The AI started pointing him towards the spiritual. As its revelations kept coming, Pu’u experienced something like a born again religious conversion: before and after the epiphany.

“You can call it a higher power, you can call it the universe,” he tells Elle Hardy. “Each individual person is going to have their own little pathway to get to the same endpoint.”

But is it … God? Hardy notes that more ordinary seekers of faith are using AI, as well as religious leaders in more formal settings. The question, she asks, is who ends up responsible for what it might tell us to do?

How long will it take to read: about six minutes

Further reading: After Esther Perel provided couples therapy for a man and his AI “girlfriend”, writer Emily Mulligan feared for the human race.

5. 20,000 books and counting

Prof Wallace Kirsop, 92, is a rare books expert, champion of (and large donator to) libraries and, with his wife, Joan, the proud owner of at least 20,000 books. Stephanie Convery went to the bibliographer’s Melbourne home to chat about the “new parochialism” of libraries ditching their printed archives and cutting opening hours.

Media coexist: Kirsop, who handwrites his manuscripts and checks his email weekly at his Monash University office, doesn’t own a computer or mobile phone. He’s not rejecting modern technology per se, Convery writes, just sticking with the tried and true.

“These modern forms only continue to be in existence and usable if the hardware continues,” he tells her. “Whereas the printed book is still here … all you need is a weatherproof room to put it in and natural light to read it.”

How long will it take to read: four minutes

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