Do We Still Read Books To Sleep Or In Our Slow Time?

At what point did we replace books with screens? Sometimes, I question myself. A book face down on the pillow, fingers drowsy from flipping pages, creased corners, sentences read twice for memory, the faint lampshade, and no urgency to update the IG feed with aesthetics, is what I call wholesome company.

Back in the early 2000s, as a schoolgirl, I crafted bookmarks and envelopes. Books did not come with bookmarks that included marketing strategies; instead, the bookmarks had a heart.

Sometimes, I made them out of handpicked flowers from my school breaks, such as cherry blossoms from Shillong, roses from familiar walkways, and bougainvillaea leaning against random home gates around the city. 

Every book had its own customised bookmark, with little drawings and quotes, that was not solely about marking a page, but bringing a garden to the bed and cherishing a lovely thought.

So, reading a book to sleep, in madoromi, as they say in Japanese, is exhaling the tiredness of the body, and inhaling pieces of peace. 

We have been curiously buying books at fairs, stores and airports. I often ask, are our books like caged pets inside the bookshelves, unbathed for years? If so, we’ll open them out tonight, after our day-long work, and take them for a walk, one after another.

They will love the wild wind, the smell of earth and the swirl of red-yellow flowers. We’ll let our Virginia rest by the riverside, cover our Neruda with our bedsheets, and bring our Kafka to the coffee table. Aren’t we tired of our habit of not reading for leisure?

The pressure of work is making us frenetic about little things, and we wonder and wander why we are not reading voraciously anymore! We are not, because we are not carrying our books!

Our handbags and backpacks are claustrophobic with chargers, headphones, sanitisers, phones and spare phones. Somewhere, we have forgotten our books back home and made them stagnant and inanimate. We are 'reel' people now, and we have forgotten to be real readers. 

Make space for reading

So, here is a thing for us, lovely Readers: let us read while we wait.

Take our books to the bus stand, the train station, the airport, with the purpose of enjoying paragraphs and stanzas, visuals and thoughts, meant for us.

We often wait alone, disconnect ourselves from the people around us, our conversations fall flat, and we slyly take out our phones and scroll through unfiltered and unwanted content.

We are consuming information, logistically curated via AI, and constantly becoming homogeneously informed about the world. In our daily lives, we have lost our idiosyncrasies of imagination.

You are me, I am you, and we have come across the same kind of art on Instagram, the same kind of music, and similar reviews on YouTube, and we have not made an effort to read beyond that.

Our life is cut short by the overconsumption of “short” videos, and we are unconsciously being driven by overstimulation. We dread every slow-paced thing.  We are easily bored and have forgotten the leisure of unravelling a story leaf by leaf, without rushing to conclude “how-to-do-this-in-one-day”. 

So, my Readers: let us read while we marinate. If the daily cook-and-clean is taking up our time, then we can bring our favourite books to the kitchen. Let Manto watch us cook garam-gosht, and Mary Oliver eat our oatcake. On a rainy morning, we’ll brew a cup of tea for R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond. While we soak the bread in egg, read a paragraph.

Read another, while our milk boils. Sometimes stare out of the window, with dhania in your hands, and become Mrs Dalloway. Oh, oranges and Wendy Cope! Oh, there goes a bird on the wire and Cohen! Say with grace: bring me a pinch of cinnamon and Ondaatje.

With the salt shaker, we’ll be a mistress of spices. Walk inside Dahl’s chocolate factory. Read while our cookies are getting baked. Make our kitchen space our reading space.

A tiny reading nook beside our indoor plants won't be a bad idea! Another way of making time is taking our book to our favourite restaurant, when alone. Our order time is our reading time.

The line from Prufrock: “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” will come alive. So will Rossetti’s “Wild free-born cranberries, /Crab-apples, dewberries, /Pine-apples, blackberries, /Apricots, strawberries;/All ripe together”.

In between the spoon and fork, tissue and pepper, our reading spree will certainly come back with a slight change in habit. 

And then, off to sleep with a book beside your pillow. Why let our fantasies and fairytales meet an apocalypse in the zap-zap of trending social media, which we bring to our beds?

We don’t want to socialise per se at midnight, but we are still doing it without being conscious. The fatigue is heightened at the end of the day because of a cascade of hacks and DIYs.

Why can’t we simply let the stories of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Panchatantra, and Lakshminath Bezbarua amaze us? Aren’t we aware that our bedtime stories are taking a back seat in the hyperreal world of social media? What is more golden than a sense of leisure, hygge in Danish, warm and intimate!

When a book slips and falls from my hand, while I doze off, I think I have read enough for the night, and now it’s time to surrender to a mental space where I float, and nothing is urgent.

As sleep carries us away, we’ll enter Wonderland, Innisfree, Oz, then take a left and spend days at Yakshapuri, then take a right and escape to Neverland. We will travel with tigers, lions and enter the eyes of dragons to find mysterious people and places.

We cannot submit to the reel world, we’ll choose an imaginary world, where alternative stories are possible. 

Dear Readers, this is not to say, read all the time, but to say, find some time to charge yourself with books. So will I. Leisure-within-leisure needs a simple “yes”! 

Authored by Jharna Choudhury (she/her) | Jharna is the author of the Assamese poetry collection Kaya (2023), and the mouth of a needle (2025), is a hand embroidery artist from Assam, India, known as “Embroidery Stories.” Her writing appears in Ethelzine, Parcham, Thumbprint Northeast, Pine Cone Review, SETU, The Little Journal of Northeast India, Muse India, WILDsound, Spillwords, and nine anthologies. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Dimoria College (Autonomous), Khetri, Assam.

This article is a part of our ongoing series, Your Monthly Dissent Dispatch, in collaboration with Usawa Literary Review. | Views expressed by the author are their own.