How to Plan Your Bedtime Reading

Even though we live in a fog of electronic media, a surprising number of people still enjoy curling up with a book and reading. And unless you have a lot of leisure time on your hands, you probably don't get around to reading for pleasure until late in the day, when you can quietly entertain yourself at your own relaxed pace.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Good bedside lighting
• Short story or poetry anthologies
• Magazines with many articles
• A big collection of designated bookmarks

1. Throughout the day you're reading stuff that you have to read: manuals, executive summaries, news articles, or school assignments. For that special moment at bedtime, you should be able to read what you want to read.
2. Collect an assortment of anthologies and magazines. You want short fiction, poetry, or articles and essays that will engage you without burdening you.
3. Tuck a bookmark inside each front cover. Every bookmark should be special, whether it's a bookstore souvenir, a stocking-stuffer gift decorated with famous authors and quotations, or something created by a child learning to love books. Rather than sticking in some random scrap of paper or dog-earing a page, give yourself a constant reminder that you're doing something wonderful.
4. Stack your books and magazines on a bedside table or shelf, or within easy reach on the floor. Put them in whatever order makes sense to you.
5. When you're ready to read something, pull from the bottom of the stack.
6. Read as much or as little of it as you want. Mark your page and set it on top of the stack when you're done.
7. Repeat Steps 5-6 at the end of each story, poem or article, or whenever you want a change of scenery. You can break the rotation whenever you want, but cycling through your stack will give you a wider variety.
8. Not every anthology includes the same number of easily digestible chunks. When you finish one book, replace it with something categorically similar (follow a collection of Japanese fiction with a collection of Latin American fiction) or wildly different (replace detective stories with a natural history magazine). Keep your stack going, and keep rotating through it.

Tips & Warnings

• As a variation, ignore the warning in Step 2 and include some slow-moving or thoughtful material in your stack. If you need to switch your consciousness off, nothing knocks you out faster!
• Sometimes you feel sleep coming on. Other times you could probably read all night. If you need a certain amount of sleep, try to respect your bedtime.
• Don't use important papers or cards as bookmarks, especially if the book is on loan from the library or someone else's house. Things get lost that way.
• Novels can be dangerous. Beware of putting your life on hold while you inhabit an exciting world between the covers of a book. You'll lose sleep, alienate your loved ones, and be useless at times when you need to be useful. If you're a book addict with limited reading time, save the novels for plane rides, sick days or vacation weeks.