Books! 

 Don't stop reading here!

 You haven't seen my list of cant-fail, Ambien replacing, REM inducing doorstop narcoleptic trance inducers. 

Think of these asYour Librarian-Certified Sleep Numbers.

Sleep inducing books must be chosen very carefully.  With you lot, there is no saying what will keep you up nights, so you may have to go further down the list for your guaranteed knock-out by typeface.

 You could borrow it from the library, but what are you going to do when you NEED it to fall asleep?  Better to buy it from a library booksale. 

You may have friends who don't realize the value of these books, who will loan you their copy.  Believe me, they aren't going to read it AGAIN.

 They are guaranteed to put you to sleep.  Don't forget to set the alarm because you are going to be deep in slumberland.

While all of these titles are pretty much guaranteed to make your eyelids feel like lead--I would recommend the final suggestion only to those of you who have pain issues or live next door to an airport runway.  

1.   Early Christian Fathers by Cyril Richardson. 

It took my husband 25 years to finish this book and he's interested in early Christian church history.

2.   Philo Vance Mysteries by S. S. Van Dine.

Philo Vance was one of the 1920s crazes--erudite and sensitive, probably gay, these books included maps of the mansions and museums in which murder had been played out.  Philo used psychological profiling based on his years of study of anthropology and theology and literature.  Guaranteed to make studying a vocabulary list seem like a new release of Warcraft.

   silent movie poster

3.  The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. 

If you like reading about man-child and the red flower (fire) and the rituals of the wolf clan and a tiger with a hard-on for human flesh, you are welcome to the tedious and involved metaphoric adventures of Mowgli.

Looks sleepy already

4.   Heidi by Johann Spyri. 

Heidi--a book in which stealing white rolls for your grandfather is moral fault.  Goats and grandfathers and healthy air.  Can you believe there were actual sequels?   Makes Switzerland seem like a Disney Princess version of a country.  

5.   Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. 

Louisa re-hashes her childhood, leaving out the hunger and hypocrisy.  If you care which one is Beth or Meg or Amy, you have saccharine running in your veins.

6.  Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. 

Alcott was supporting a family, not hers, by then, so she re-uses the same healthy and energetic American values with a dash of education for men and women in a male version.  Paint drying has more thrills.

Louisa:  stayed up late writing novels

 7.  Edward Bulwer-Lytton. 

E B-L, First Baron of Lytton, was idolized by the Brits for his novels--oodles of novels.  Dickens idolized the guy.  Nowadays he is famous for a contest for bad writing named after his opening phrase, "it was a dark and stormy night."  If you want to find these morphine-like trance inducers, you may luck out with The Last Days of Pompeii, which features a lecherous priest (I could never get to the actual volcano eruption scenes).  One might also be able to find in print the often anthologized by never imitated (by talented writers),  the horror story The Haunted and the Haunters or The House and the Brain(1859).  We shouldn't foget Bulwer-Lytton altogether, just because his marriage was such a farce--his wife and he committed adultery so freely that neither could get a good divorce attorney.

"The Pen is Mightier than the Sword"

8.  Cataloging in Practice, Practical Cataloging, and the Grand-daddy of all The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd rev. ed.  

You don't have to go to library school to discover boring books, but every real librarian you meet has been tested by one or another version of these brain-deadeners.  Explaining how to catalog books is like explaining how the earth's crust formed, layer by layer, eon by eon but with more words.  Boring, prissy words.  

(gentle snore)

How You'll Sleep