Still the best medicine

The books we keep by our beds usually serve one of two purposes — to either put us to sleep or keep us awake. The latter has never made much sense to me, yet some people do take a thriller or some equally compelling book to bed with them and then tell later about not being able to sleep until they had finished it.

For busy people, bedtime may be their only opportunity to read, but most likely it is also their only opportunity to sleep. So which has priority, and if they were busy all day, how can they stay awake long enough to read more than a few pages? I never could, no matter how exciting the book.

Books to help one sleep seem to me the best ones to keep by the bed. Even when one is wide awake in midday, some books make one drowsy almost instantly. Those are the books to keep by the bed. 

My own current bedside book may seem a bit odd: Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States. I never read it before I go to sleep at night because I'm sleepy then, but only if I wake during the night and can't get back to sleep. This happens once or twice a month. After I toss and turn for 30 minutes or more, unable to let my mind rest, that's when I turn on the light and read a chapter of Dave Barry.

This is outrageously funny stuff, often making me laugh out loud. Even the chapter titles are funny. He calls chapter 10 "The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself in the Eyeball" and chapter 11: "The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven."

I find that this works better than Henry James or Ford Madox Ford. Laughter may be more effective than any sleeping pill.

I am also reading a David Baldacci thriller, but that I open after dinner each evening, when I want to stay awake.