Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

If I’m not working or around other people, more often than not, I want to be reading. The rise in availability of audiobooks has made this easier to achieve. One can read a physical book when stationary, then listen to an audiobook when driving, tidying up, walking or otherwise in motion. I like to get the same book in both formats for complete immersion: read the book over breakfast, switch to the audiobook on the stereo while getting ready for work, listen on headphones during my commute.

My fall-asleep routine always, inviolably, involves reading either a physical or Kindle book. It’s so effective a soporific that most nights I struggle to read for more than 10 minutes, which is both satisfying and maddening. I’ve tried falling asleep to audiobooks, but there’s something about it that’s too passive. It’s almost as if I need to be actively engaged in the pursuit of staying awake in order to fall asleep. Reading a physical book in bed, my eyes and hands and even bent knees against which the book is resting are all enlisted in the reading process, a warrior pose against sleep. But sleep always wins.

I came across this piece in The Times the other day, “Audiobooks to Lull You to Sleep.” I was intrigued, even though I’d already established that such a practice was not for me. That phrasing, that promise “to lull you to sleep,” shifted the idea of the presleep audiobook for me. As children, we were sung lullabies, read bedtime stories. Once children outgrow these parental ministrations, they’re on their own. That intimacy of being read to and sung to and having their sleep treated as a precious creative project is finished. (“And not a moment too soon!” I hear exhausted parents cry.) But do we ever outgrow the desire to be lulled, whether by soothing voice or chamomile tea or sleep gummy? I don’t think so.

“Ever fallen asleep to an audiobook?” I asked in one of my group texts. “Duh, most nights,” my friend Natalie responded immediately. She’s partial to whodunits, nothing too complicated. My friend Chris said one of his most vivid reading experiences was of soothing himself to sleep with Stephen King’s “The Outsider” during a bout with Covid. “It was very trippy because I was only ever partially conscious,” he said. “It was like I was dreaming the book.”

Another friend had a list of rules for falling asleep to audiobooks: Choose a book you’ve read before so you’re not overly concerned with following the plot. Use one earbud to listen if you’re worried about keeping a partner awake. Set a sleep timer so you’re not awakened by a particularly animated scene. And the narrator can’t be too dynamic: The experience of Thandiwe Newton reading “War and Peace” was too theatrical for her.

Someone suggested that falling asleep to audiobooks might be hostile to the appreciation of literature. While in my ideal reading scenario I approach a book with intention and the full scope of my concentration, that setup is increasingly unrealistic. I asked Dion Graham, a narrator of audiobooks, including Colson Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto” and David Grann’s “The Wager,” how he felt about the idea of people falling asleep to his voice. He sees it as a privilege of being an adult: “You get to have a bedtime story any time you want,” he said, adding, “You’re a grown-up, so nobody can tell you you have to go to bed. You can listen all night.”