Reading more, Sleeping better
All it took was this one simple trick! (kidding, clickbait, this is about books)
But first, a little about sleep—because they turn out to be related. I have always been a champion sleeper, with some explicable interruptions (kids, worry, the usual). But all of a sudden I found myself taking forever to fall asleep and waking up a lot.
I played with all the things. Room temperature, mattress, timing, dark bedroom, melatonin, CBD, etc., etc. (I was going to try marijuana, but I ventured into the store armed only with a credit card, which you can’t use to buy it, and it was packed with barriers to entry that exceeded my limited attention span, so I never did. I mean, I’ve tried it, but not for that. Mostly it just makes me thirsty anyway.)
Things kinda worked and mostly didn’t and I thought, as you do, about what has changed (other than, you know, the world and my IRA and also my age and stuff like that). What’s changed that I control.
And I came up with this: I’ve been reading a lot more on my phone at night—and not books. Articles (mostly about fashion and shopping, health, the kind of thing I would have read in a magazine back in the day—*a few faves are linked below.). Sometimes the news, but I’m not dumb, I know that’s not conducive to sleep, so not really. Emails like this one. Stuff I like and enjoy that I’m not sorry I read at all—not a “I spend too much time on my phone” sitch, but maybe it wasn’t helping.
I was still reading a book before bed most nights, but we were talking 10-15 minutes, tops, between when I put down the phone and when I tried to go to sleep, and sometimes less. Well, that’s a thing I could play with without dropping $200 on a mattress topper that I loved and my husband hated (which I totally did) or one that he loved and I hated (ditto, ugh). So I did—and by shifting my reading off the wee phone** and into paper books and my e-reader, I found myself finally falling and staying asleep again***—AND I got to read three fun books that you’re going to love—found families, regular families, a little romance, page-turning questions that demand answers but not of the “will the killer strike again” variety. And here they are! Two will be gifts for your future self (seriously, pre-order these, you’ll thank me). One you can grab right now this minute.
Welcome to Glorious Tuga, Francesca Segal: this one you can grab right now. Would you perhaps like to escape to a small tropical island with a small population of people who for the past few hundred years have formed a fairly egalitarian community that’s reachable by boat for half the year and inaccessible to the rest, where you can study rare species of tortoises and also rare types of humans who manage to live in this kinda weird but also weirdly normal way? There will be storms and drama and romance and stories of past exploits from lots of points of view but mostly our protagonist, who thought she was going to study tortoises but is now the local vet, All Creatures Great and Small style. I’m maybe not selling this well but I loved it and I think you will too.
Mansion Beach, Meg Mitchell Moore. THE PERFECT BEACH READ. I think everyone will be loving this this summer. It’s a page-turner-y multi POV summer saga with everything you could ask for: a beach, a body, rich people behaving badly but also sometimes not behaving badly, parties, drama and just enough gender-swapped Gatsby to think hard about the meaning of the American Dream.
Welcome to Murder Week, Karen Dukess. This book is a delight—cross an old school British cozy with Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and you have this, a delightful page-turner in which you’re totally invested in all that is happening that is also somehow totally free of any anxiety or stress-producing angst.
Seriously tell me if you’ve done anything great to bring back solid sleep—or found any delightful good before bed books! (Such a mysterious category. The God of the Woods: No. The Wedding People: Yes. (Just bought and finished her previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and it’s a not before bedtime but also good—more on that soon.)
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, , , , , (these are my fashion and style people, not my book and writer people ALTHOUGH they are absolutely also writers. List of those another time.)**Okay, so I did some research. That whole blue light from phone keeps you up thing? Not something the NYT would have let me cite, back in the day—there’s just not enough support. Maybe it’s the light, maybe it’s the way your brain doesn’t chill out and grab something other than your wildly thoughts when you’re reading articles, maybe it’s just my own brain happily returning to its old ways. But SOMETHING was going wrong here, and this helped, and that’s all I’ve got.
***Surprising unfortunate side effect: I wake up all stiff when I don’t toss and turn at night. Apparently that’s my version of yoga. Great.
Because of this article, I started Welcome to Glorious Tuga today, and I am in love. I also wrote about it on my Substack and mentioned you. THANK YOU@
The best thing about reading Welcome to Glorious Tuga now is that it is the first in a trilogy, and the second book comes out this summer. I listened to the audiobook, and it was excellent.
My best trick for sleep in recent years has been to listen to audiobooks that I only listen to before bed, so my brain starts to associate those voices with sleep. I started with Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, which I listened to basically five minutes at a time for years, but finally I couldn't do it anymore. Now, it's more often one of the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, all beautifully narrated by Alison Larkin. Bonus--there are 12 of them! (Mostly) Low stakes, familiar stories. I set the sleep timer for 30 minutes, and generally I'm asleep within 5 minutes, 10 at the most. If I wake up in the middle of the night or earlier than I want to be awake, I just turn it back on, and back to sleep I go.
All of that said, I probably should still read more before bed!