Booking Through Thursday question:
- Do you read in bed? For how long? Do you fall asleep reading? Will a good book keep you up all night?
I wish I could read in bed. I can only read in bed if I am sitting up. But I am unable, apparently, to put my head down on a pillow – even if it’s 11 am – without falling into deep REM. It’s actually kind of frustrating. I can’t lie in bed and watch TV, and I have to sit upright to read. Bed is only for sleeping apparently.
And I hate hate HATE falling asleep reading. I am so against it. Reading is something I do when I am alert, wide-awake – and I hate having to re-read stuff because of sleep interrupting my consciousness and my ability to, you know, understand what I was reading.
Oh, and I have most definitely stayed up all night before with a good book. Darkness at Noon comes to mind. I could not leave that book unfinished. Other books I stayed up all night reading (just one more chapter, one more chapter): The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – that was one I was just unable to put down. Stephen King’s It – I was afraid to stop reading at certain points because those freakin’ monsters in the sewers would come into my dreams. Keep going, keep going. Also Moby Dick. I stayed up all night reading that one. I was living in Hoboken – in this horrible apartment – the one I lived in right before Sept. 11 … and I decided to re-read Moby Dick – which I had been FORCED to read in grade school – and frankly, re-reading that book was one of the most exciting literary experiences of my life. I don’t even know how to talk about it, and I’ve rarely posted on it – it’s too hard to talk about. Kate understands – she re-read it at around the same time – and we had many INSANE conversations on the phone, where we both were saying, “How about ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’????” “HOLY SHIT, THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE.” We would read passages out loud to each other. We would sit in silence, contemplating Pip’s fate, and what happened to him. What happened to him … Dudes. Seriously. I’ve never had a reading experience like that, before or since.
- Where do you keep your nighttime reading? Do you have a special table next to the bed? Are there many books there? Do you keep books there that you aren’t reading (finished or unread)?
Well, I’m not really a nighttime reader, really. (See comment above. I cannot crawl into bed with a book. I’ll be out like a light even if I have just woken up. It’s a huge bummer.) I’m more of a morning reader, or an early afternoon reader. No, scratch that: I read anywhere, anytime. Woody Allen said once something about always needing a book on him, because – what if the line at the bank is long – meaning he has to wait 2 minutes – or what if the elevator doesn’t come in 3.7 seconds? He has a book. I am like that too. Right now I am reading the Dino book, in elevators, on busses, on subways, as I walk down the street, in line at the deli … etc.
Back to the question. I do have a table next to my bed – but since I don’t read in bed I don’t keep my current books there. No. Those books are usually just sitting in my bookbag, from their day walking around with me – or they are strewn about the floor. I do, though, have books next to the bed. Just little books I like to have nearby. Book of Common Prayer. Bible. And a wonderful book of inspirational quotes that I really love – you get one a day. It’s my morning ritual.
I am a bedtime reader. On some long, hard, relentless days, knowing I’ll get to crawl into bed and read at the end of it is the one thing that gets me through. And if I know that I won’t be able to — if I’ve got a project that I know I’ll be spending the whole night working on or something – I feel so horribly wronged and deprived, like I’m not getting a present on Christmas morning. It’s ridiculous.
But for as much deep joy as I get out of bedtime reading, I think I wish more that I, like you, was incapable of lying down without falling asleep. That would be truly delicious: to know, FOR SURE, that when it was time for sleep, sleep would come.
Also, on the subject of always carrying a book: it really is so, so smart. I came to it late in life through my husband, a native New Yorker who developed the habit over a lifetime of subway & bus riding, etc. He would never ever be caught without some little book tucked in a pocket, bag or whatever — it’s totally second nature for him to grab something as part of his leaving-the-house ritual. Unfortunately I’m not as good about it, and now … because I’ve discovered how great it is when you DO have a book with you … it’s complete torture to be stuck on a train, in a line or whatever without one. Torture!!
Another Sheila–That is such an obvious and splendid idea, I cannot believe I haven’t thought of it before. You have just changed my future. Bless you. I am someone who got used to reading whole books in a sitting(or two), and, as my adult life changed that possibility, I have had to get accustomed to reading in bits and pieces. I don’t like it, and always feel I am doing the author an injustice. With your idea, I can fit reading in here and there throughout the day, and not take two weeks to read something. I can maintain some flow and continuity. Just a great idea–again, thanks.
I can’t sleep without reading myself to sleep.
I always take a book with me if I’m going somewhere overnight so that I don’t end up reading the Gideon bible in the nightstand, or sneaking around someone’s house looking for something, ANYTHING, to read.
My bedside table, which is a antique washstand with a marble top from an old bank in my parents’ home town, is usually piled with books. Right now The Pact by Jodi Picoult is on top of the stack.
I also can’t eat without reading. If I have to eat out alone, I always have something to read. At home, I read while I eat, sitting at the table or on the couch. My whole family is like that. My mom has a picture of me and my brother, sitting at the table at breakfast, reading the back of our respective cereal boxes. We were about 7 and 10.
“Where do you keep your nighttime reading?”
Well, there’s my bookcase in the bedroom (not to be confused with my wife’s bookcase in the bedroom), then there’s the bookshelf on top of the dresser, then there are usually a couple of books on my nightstand, then there are the (currently three) piles of books on the floor between the nightstand and the dresser. Of course, I usually just get a book from my briefcase, but you can never tell when you might finish one of those, so….
“I am unable, apparently, to put my head down on a pillow – even if it’s 11 am – without falling into deep REM.”
I don’t suppose you’d be willing to trade that problem for my recurring bouts of insomnia? ;-)
Insomnia is such a bitch. Sorry you suffer from it … I had an insomniac time in my life and it was a horror.
Oh man, I guess I’m really envious of those of you who can lie down for an hour or so with a book – before bed – and just have a nice quiet time reading.
It’s like there’s a freakin’ narcolepsy switch in my pillow the minute my head hits it. I can sit ON the bed, surrounded by pillows and fleece blankets – but I cannot go horizontal cause then I am toast.
DBW – in the last couple of years I have gradually segued to reading a couple of different books at a time. I’m like you – I’m a one-book girl … but I found that there were certain books that “go” with my commute (which is a short one) – or certain books that “go” on the treadmill with me – then there are my big books, the ones that I sit with a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning and read 80 pages of. These are usually my non-fiction, or my biographies. But I usually carry a copy of some writer’s short stories with me – those are really good for sound-bite reading. Or for those times when you have to wait in line, or whatever.
I have my iPod and I love music and all … but reading is where I really zone out, where I really lose all track of time, and where I am. It’s such a wonderful escape, isn’t it?
So speaking of all of this:
tell me, all of you:
what are you reading right now??
I am reading my Dino biography. I am also reading a collection of short stories by Mary Gaitskill. I am also reading, in snippets (this is a treadmill book believe it or not) Tale of 2 Cities.
It’s not chronic, thank God. Once or twice a year there’ll be three or four days in a row I can’t sleep, and yes, a horror is a good description. It’s torturous. And I know in the back of my head that if I’m really working myself madly hard, and under too much stress, then that’s when it’ll get severe just when I need rest the most.
So, I don’t stress myself out: I don’t worry even though I probably should since I have a million things to do in this job and not nearly enough hours in the day. It’s an absurd amount of work and yet, in a way it’s not “work” at all: there are days I love it, and days I hate it, but there’s never one moment that I regret it. I don’t know if I’ll be a prosecutor forever (what’s forever when I can barely picture next week?), but there’s absolutely nothing more right for me to be doing right now.
God, I am just so happy to hear that. Great news.
My bed reading (yes, being past 60, bed is for reading, not sleeping) right now is a sampler platter combo of Mark Twain’s ‘Life on the Mississippi’, a volume of Chekhov short stories (His ‘A Dreary Story’ ranks up there with any including Jim’s ‘The Dead’), and Granta, the superb British literary Magazine. I like to keep several books going, but all from different parts of the menu.
I always have a book in my bag–usually the same one that ends up on my bedside table at the end of the day, too. I’m currently reading Joyce Carol Oates’ The Falls. Good so far.
Sheila, I remember those Moby Dick conversations so well! I still get totally freaked out thinking about the passage when Pip loses his shit after being underwater. Glistening orbs or something? He can’t be the same after seeing what he saw, so he just goes batshit. Scary!!
I looooved talking with you about that damn book.
But what was it with Pip?? What happened?
Did he comprehend eternity and he could never be the same again? WTF???? Scariest chapter ever. Let me get it off the shelf right now.
Okay just found the passage. It’s “colossal orbs” you insane pregnant lady with the freaky memory.
Here’s the Pip passage – ready for it??
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whal was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the center of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful loneliness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea – mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instaces not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels them uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
Holy crap. That’s just a couple of paragraphs out of that damn book. And it’s ALL like that.
//The intense concetration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea – mark how clowly they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.//
shivers ….
poor Pip
I used to read in bed. Until one night I picked up a book intending to read a few pages. Five hours later, I set it down. It was 3am and I had to be at work in three hours.
Since then, I don’t read in bed.
Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense. Holy SHIT. That is just such intense writing. And it IS all like that. It’s incredible. I feel sorry for the next book anyone reads right after that. It can’t help but taste like lite beer.
Thank you for posting that passage. I’m going to have to look at it again.
You’re insane.
You know, it reminds me of Ophelia’s mad scene (that always seems to get butchered, except when Kate Winslet did it.) The same feel of seeing something that exposed and enormous and never being able to go back to normal after witnessing it. That whole “woe is me, to see what I have seen, see what I see.” Not to get all John Barton and crap, but all those monosyllabic open vowels–she might as well be screaming inside.
OK, one more thing and then I’ll stop (or I’ll be the one to lose my mind and never return): Ophelia and Pip should meet.
Actually, now that I said that, it sounds dumb. Like something that K-Y girl would direct and force you to be in. “Are you listening Perspehone?”
Sadly, it is too early in the school year for me to read for pleasure. I fall asleep no matter where I am- in bed, or a chair! Oh- does it count that I read the kindergarten journals? They look something like this: “ILVMIKT” Translation: “I love my cat”. After a while, you get really good at translating.
Kate –
//all those monosyllabic open vowels–she might as well be screaming inside.//
Gives me goosebumps. Yes. Kate Winslet nailed it. I’ve seen that scene a gazillion times – and never REALLY seen it work except when she did it.
Kate – and I’m insane?? You’re the one who remembered that the word “orbs” appeared in that passage.
hahahaha
I think I need to read the book again – after just looking at that one passage. Holy God, it’s just – untouchable.
The line was: How are you Persephone??
Mitchell turned it into, “Can you hear me, Isis?”
hahahaha
K-Y. Honestly.
Beth – that is so cute and so hysterical. hahahaha
I’m a bed reader. I’m also a periodic* insomniac.
I would love to be able to fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow but that rarely happens. I find that for me, reading for anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour before I try to sleep helps a lot. I need to read “non work related” things; no books of biology, no journal articles. Mysteries work well, and I’m also reading up on early American history.
I’m not so bothered by having to re-read, I guess – usually I have to reread the last page or three I finished the night before, because by that time I was tired enough that the material wasn’t making an impression.
Right now, I’m alternating between a Ngaio Marsh mystery novel, and Founding Brothers, and C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
For a long time, a big fat book I had on the pre-Indo-European culture worked. I never finished it; I just don’t have the anthro background to understand enough of what I was reading. At points, it was just WORDS. Like trying to read a foreign language I only partly know. (I’d like to take another stab at the book – this would be my fourth – but I think I need to find a more basic book on anthropological methods and read it first). I’m nothing if not persistent.
(*ha ha, I made a menstrual-cycle pun. But it’s really true – that’s what my insomnia synchs up with)
But seriously – insomnia is a horror. Worse even than the nights of not-sleeping are the way the following days feel – the way time moves like molasses, and the way I have to stop and actively search my memory banks for the particular word I want.
I am like Another Sheila, who HAS to read something when she goes to bed; otherwise – like her – I feel deprived. Very much so! It’s just that the time when I go to bed is pretty much the only time when I am relaxed and can read in peace, whereas on my commutes (which are pretty long and stressful at times – thanks to the awful transportation system in Buenos Aires) I tend to get distracted a lot. For this reason, on my commutes I mostly read a news magazine: short articles require a shorter attention span than books. But I HAVE to read on my commutes, that’s for sure.
So, bedtime is MY absolutely perfect reading time; on weekdays I tend to fall asleep at the third paragraph, but in spite of it all: I NEED to grab a book to go to sleep. It’s psychological.
Also, I have the habit of reading several books simultaneously. Right now I’m reading the third tome (out of a total of seven) of Mommsen’s history of Rome; the first Harry Potter book (I have them all, but never got to read them before); and Jane Austen’s letters. Wow, this is crazy!
i’m not only a bed reader, i’m an everywhere reader, too. there’s at least one book with me almost everywhere i go. and fortunately for me, i’ve never been just a one-book girl. for what i’ve tried, i can read as many as 12 at a time without confusing them. sometime i may attempt going higher. but you know it’s bad when you pack 8 books for a short family vacation, and finish them all halfway through, and it’s chronic when you’re passing the freaking Appalachians for the first time in your life, and your parents have to yell at you from the front of the car to put the book down and pay attention to the scenery!