Reading in bed has become a new experience these past 10 months. When Math-Man and I lived together, I frequently went to bed before he did, announcing that I was going to read for a while. "For a while" meant about 5 minutes, apparently. I would fall asleep with the light on and my glasses still perched on my nose. He would come upstairs later and tend to the Andrea-housekeeping. Alas, during this year I've woken up more than once with the light still on, my glasses lost somewhere in the bedclothes and using my book as a pillow. This will not do. Change number one is that I have to choose books for night-time reading that will keep me engaged enough that I don't konk out before dealing with these end-of-the-day tasks.
Problem #2 with reading between the sheets is that the book can't require so much thought that my brain starts to race and then I can't sleep at all. Virtuous claims that I will, at long last, get through Proust are for naught -at least in the context of bedtime reading.
So, with those requirements for engaging but not deep reading, here's what I have so far.
- Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
- The Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast by Bill Richardson
- Window Poems by Wendell Berry (one of my literary loves)
What are your ideas? What are you reading?
4 comments:
I finished a translation of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française last week (and liked it so well I went and bought a copy of the original at a bookshop in the Latin Quarter last weekend). The other ones I have with me at the moment:
Gérard Noiriel, Les origines républicaines de Vichy
Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj, Français comme les autres?
Patrick Weil, Qu'est-ce qu'un Français? and La France et ses étrangers
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
Vincent Virga, Gaywyck
(That last one was my bedtime reading, but I finished it two weeks ago.)
I loved Suite Francaise. LOVED it. That other stuff????? That's too work-y for me to read at night. I'd be snoozing before a paragraph had gone by.
My bedtime reading usually consists of some magazine (right now, it's the current issue of Oregon Home) or one of the jillion catalogs I get in the mail every day. I have a tendency towards the awake one moment, out like a light the next moment thing that hits one when one reaches the half-century mark, so anything I actually want to read does not go to bed with me at night. Unless I want (or not) to be awake all night (another mid-life phenomenon...)
Well, Andrea, my bed-time reading has to be lighter than light. I have been reading a book of essays called Sole Sisters. Yes, it's about women runners, but it has some themes that reach out to us all.
The benefits are that it's a little book, no feeling of dismay hits you when you pick it up, and broken up into small, easily digested chapters.
I highly recommend the essay on Sister Marion Nesbit!
Post a Comment