We’ve got through Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, and Immune, by Phillip Dettmer
We tried Conspirituality, which is a great book that I’ve read, but didn’t work with bedtime reading
We also tried The Secret Network of Nature, by Peter Wohlleben, and although the subject matter was interesting, the pace and prose were dull.
The reason why Endurance worked was because the language was rich, incredibly engaging, and really fun to read aloud. It was pretty harrowing, and didn’t lend itself to lulling to sleep, but it was a small price to pay for how endlessly epic it was.
Immune did a really good job of breaking down an incredibly complex subject with ingenious analogies, and was sort of narrativised, which made it a page turner.
Being true and having a “learning” element definitely seems to help to engage the recipient.
Fiction hasn’t yet been attempted.
I am an avid lifelong reader of everything. My wife has read about two books in her life and one of them was a yoga manual.
by Zapnesta
4 Comments
Short stories may be a good choice, there are many good ones by authors like Agatha Christie, Ray Bradbury, Steven King, Ted Chiang ect
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
The Greatest Game Ever Played by Mark Frost
Mawson’s Will by Bickell? It’s another survival in Antarctica nonfiction book, but damn, if you liked Endurance you would probably love it.
My partner reads to me when I’m anxious, my favourite ones have been Cosmos by Karl Sagan, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking and Sapiens By Yuval Noah Harari. Also Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman for a fiction recommendation