I am reading aloud every night to my husband and a friend in far-off Brooklyn. We like memoirs because it’s ok to read just a little or miss a bit. Trevor Noah’s bio was our first and favorite and we’re now on Anthony Fauci’s, more laborious with lots of names, agencies, and hard-to-pronounce drugs. Also AIDS and Ebola and Covid, so perhaps not the best nighttime reading. But still, I feel like I owe him a debt of gratitude and my full attention, so there you have it.
reading the classics at bedtime works for me--Henry James or George Eliot or something along those lines--because the prose and ideas are inspiring and wonder-inducing, but the plots tend to be so slow-moving that there is no temptation to keep reading forever and they often put me to sleep very quickly. also, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is a magical bedtime book--incredible memoir/nature writing that is awe-inspiring but also somehow immediately soporific at the same time. it's soothing to know that there are people out there caring so deeply and in such nuanced ways about the natural world--so soothing that it puts me right to sleep
I am reading aloud every night to my husband and a friend in far-off Brooklyn. We like memoirs because it’s ok to read just a little or miss a bit. Trevor Noah’s bio was our first and favorite and we’re now on Anthony Fauci’s, more laborious with lots of names, agencies, and hard-to-pronounce drugs. Also AIDS and Ebola and Covid, so perhaps not the best nighttime reading. But still, I feel like I owe him a debt of gratitude and my full attention, so there you have it.
Oh I think that would keep me up! But I agree on memoirs in general.
reading the classics at bedtime works for me--Henry James or George Eliot or something along those lines--because the prose and ideas are inspiring and wonder-inducing, but the plots tend to be so slow-moving that there is no temptation to keep reading forever and they often put me to sleep very quickly. also, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is a magical bedtime book--incredible memoir/nature writing that is awe-inspiring but also somehow immediately soporific at the same time. it's soothing to know that there are people out there caring so deeply and in such nuanced ways about the natural world--so soothing that it puts me right to sleep
I listen to books durin the day and almost never at night.