My bedtime reads are nearly all comfort reads—detective stories, old favorites, classic children’s literature, with the occasional new-to-me book to keep it fresh.
Last spring I decided to read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books, including the short story collections—from Whose Body? to Striding Folly—in the order of publication, which I had never done before. Here’s the list I used for guidance. Of these, Five Red Herrings is the only one I’d never finished though I’d tried a few times before. Reading Gaudy Night so close on the heels of The Nine Tailors (my favorite of the novels) was especially interesting because I saw connections between the two stories I’d never noticed before. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what they were because I didn’t write them down. I keep telling myself that I need to do daily written narrations... but that wouldn’t really work for bedtime books, would it? Hm... 🤔
I finished the last of the short stories in January, so next I picked up a book my family had given me for Christmas: Murder for Christmas, which is a collection of short stories by various authors from Charles Dickens to Ellery Queen. They don’t all involve murder, but they’re all stories of the “cozy murder mystery” type. Some, like Marjorie Bowen’s “Cambric Tea,” gave me the chills. Others, like Damon Runyon’s “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” and “Mr. Big,” by Woody Allen (I didn’t know he wrote stories!), were laugh-out-loud funny. I read about half of them and decided to save the rest for next winter.
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| "Bedtime Books" photo op in my study because the lighting and background are better lol |
The reason I stopped half way through that book is that Eldest Daughter handed me something she’d just found in a local used book shop—Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling. These stories all have a “slice of life” flavor and are all written from the perspective of a narrator who either observed the action or was told about it later; in very few cases was he a participant. The stories run the gamut from humorous, like “His Wedded Wife,” to tragic, like “Thrown Away.” Kipling was only twenty-three years old when he published this collection but you wouldn’t guess that from the maturity of style and insight into human nature.
Now I’m on to some classic children’s lit—the Alice books, which I haven’t read in at least twenty years.
