![]() So while you’ll be getting a good night’s sleep, you’ll also be reaping numerous health benefits. It slows down your breathing and helps maintain a sense of calm throughout your body, thus resulting in a far better sleep.Īs an added bonus, reading exercises your brain so it’ll improve your creativity, brain power and even protect against Alzheimer’s. So if you’re wondering how to relax your mind before bed, disconnecting from technology and diving into a good book may be the answer.īedtime reading distracts your mind and reduces stress. The blue light emitting from your computer, phone and TV screen doesn’t help either. General feelings of stress and anxiety can make getting a good night’s sleep more difficult than it needs to be. Here's a closer look at the benefits of bedtime reading alongside the top 20 books you should be reading in bed. We’ve compiled a list of 20 books in particular to tickle your fancy and get you drifting off towards a better night’s sleep. There are plenty of benefits to reading a good book before you sleep. How many of us still open a book and drift away through reading? We’re almost spoilt for choice when it comes to what to do before you go to bed. We could all do with a lot more of your chitter-chatter.We can envisage the typical adults in bed – iPad out, scrolling through their phones, TV on or headphones in. Take a break from Mars, and explore the cosmos of emotional minutiae. That means more male novelists, sure, but also more male readers. And, with the selfishness of a voyeur, I want to know what that’s like for men. Literary fiction is how we can study human frailty, making the world of feelings, friendship, love, personal dilemma, rivalry, money and psychology rich terrain for exploration. But the thing is, women don’t just read novels to understand ourselves: we read them to understand each other. Maybe the problem isn’t that women have come to dominate the fields traditionally occupied by men, but that men don’t really want to think about how economic conditions and changing cultural values have made them more like women. Melancholic longing for a lost world of exploration, purpose and action can – as we see in stand up comedy, or the online manosphere – curdle into a generalised sense of aggrievement. There’s a reluctance, perhaps, to grapple with what this all means for men. These things take you out of the home, and into the world. It’s no wonder that male curiosity is being directed towards narrative podcasts, non-fiction, sci-fi and fantasy. Even before the pandemic made offices of our homes, the shift to an information and services-based economy collapsed the indoors/outdoors distinction between men and women. But today, that’s the way most people live and work. Women sit around and feel things, but men go out and do stuff: the idea of being confined inside, processing text and leading a sedentary lifestyle, has been traditionally disparaged as being unmanly. It’s like straight white men have given up on the subtleties of literary fiction and said: “Fuck it – I’m doing stand up about cancel culture instead.” Celebrity authors and those with big fan bases, like Richard Osman and Lee Child, may shift product, but creatively, straight white men haven’t kept up with those who’ve previously been consigned to the margins. In recent years, the work of Marian Keyes has been critically reappraised meanwhile Torrey Peters, and Candice Carty-Williams have garnered both plaudits and decent sales figures. ![]() Commercially successful writing by women is, mercifully, no longer automatically designated as ‘chick-lit’. Bernardine Evaristo, Paul Beatty, and Anna Burns have been lauded by the Booker committee for their narrative experimentation meanwhile publishing houses across the country scour the internet for the next Sally Rooney. Where straight white men used to dominate bestseller charts and prize shortlists, now it is people of colour, LGBT people and women who are both at the avant-garde of writing and driving sales in stores. In 2000, men made up 61% of the UK’s top selling hardbacks. Part of this may be down to the changing landscape of authors themselves.
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