I sometimes play audiobooks I’ve already read in order to fall asleep. I don’t care what’s happening in the story, the sentences are so beautifully constructed that I let them just wash me with pleasure until I fall asleep. Some books I use for this are Frankenstein, Lolita (not the disgusting parts), The Picture of Dorian Gray and Atonement. Do you have any books in mind where the prose is so overwhelmingly good sentence by sentence that it doesn’t matter what the sentences are actually saying?
by dazzaondmic
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[The Girl Who Drank the Moon](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/b8b6a493-2301-493a-bc3e-d4e79c04f4a3) by Kelly Barnhill and [A Tree Grows in Brooklyn](https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/dc5de2f5-b132-4c4c-8e49-8bf46005d5da) by Betty Smith
Sir Thomas Browne, any of his essays.
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Under Milk Wood. The audio version with Richard Burton.
Moby Dick. This book is about whales and whale hunting, and it’s safe to say I wasn’t very interested in either of those when I started reading this book. But DEAD HEAVENS was the prose so gorgeous that I could not put it down. To date, I haven’t read another book with prose as good as this one.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D. G. Compton
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. I found this book a bit anxiety-inducing at the beginning, so I don’t know if it’s best to listen to before bed.
I”d suggest Charles Dickens. His writing is not to everyone’s taste, but to me it’s beautiful and often hilarious.
Also the Brontes, and Edith Wharton
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I hate plotless stories but this was amazing.
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway & To the Lighthouse
Obviously prose style is a personal opinion but the stream of consciousness writing style here is something special and worth trying.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Never seen such a grim story told with such beautiful language.
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. It reads like poetry.
– A Dowry of Blood by Saint Gibson
– Gallant by V. E. Schwab
– The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
East of Eden. It’s so beautiful you are convinced Timshel is a real word.
{{The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler}} is like that for me. I had to read the book three times or more to understand what was going on. But Chandler’s prose is beautiful.
His other books are like that too. But The Big Sleep is his first and most famous.