Browsing stock photo images of nightstands, I feel envious. So many elegant little tables adorned with some combination of lamp, alarm clock, vase, soothing beverage, and book. The table tops are occupied without being crowded. Occasionally some have as many as two books, in a pile with a clock atop them.
Technically I don’t have a nightstand. The doors and windows of our bedroom are placed in such a way that there’s no room for a single nightstand, let alone two. Instead we have a bed frame that includes under-bed drawers and a headboard with a shelf and a couple of drawers in the middle. It’s not the most comfortable setup for reading in bed, but with the pillows piled, it serves. There’s no space to store a chamber pot—the original purpose of the nightstand, as it turns out—but there’s plenty of room for books, lamps, and clocks, albeit in a rather more crowded configuration than the online images.
My side of the lower shelf has about 15 books, all of them to-be-reads, and a stuffed cat. The top surface serves as my nightstand. I have a combination alarm clock/CD player, a stack of CDs, a little reading lamp, because the built-in lights that came with the bed frame burned out long ago, a couple of artificial plants, and the stack of four books that I’m currently reading. These are my nightstand books. They wander a fair amount. Sometimes they come outside for coffee under the trees. Sometimes they go riding in the car. Mostly, though, I read them in or near the bed.
A month ago the stack was higher. Overwhelming, even. There were seven books in the pile, which is a relatively reasonable number, but several were chonky volumes of 500 pages or more. On looking at the pile I was starting to feel disappointed with myself, rather than energized. This is unusual for me, because I’ve always enjoyed reading multiple books at a time, with interruptions for the delightful occasions when one book captures me and makes it so that there’s nothing else I can do but finish it. Back in my 20s, when I was single, I also had a headboard with a shelf, on which I stored stacks of paperbacks and a coffeemaker, so that I could make a cup of coffee and start reading without leaving the bed, bopping from book to book with caffeinated abandon.
Still, I don’t argue with agita. I made a plan to deal with the stack and whittled it down to four. Four is the minimum number to make a meal, which is what I see my nightstand books as comprising. Remember that Francis Bacon quote about ingesting books, with some “to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”? Oftentimes I mush the books together like some diner forking potatoes, peas, and chicken into a single bite. I never would do this in a real meal—I eat one item at a time—but it takes way longer to read even the most breathless and gripping 300-page novel than it does to eat a serving of vegetables. Even Brussels sprouts, my least favorite of the tolerable greens.
I start my meals with the most challenging element, which for me is always the vegetables. That’s why the top book in my current stack is…
1. The vegetable: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Selected Essays. I thought this would be a broccoli book. Broccoli is a vegetable that I actually find somewhat tasty. On the other hand, if it turned out that broccoli was not good for me I would give it up without a regret. This spring and summer I’d become curious about various New England literary figures of the 1800s, especially the Massachusetts writers, and about the transcendentalist movement, of which Emerson was a part. I’d liked a lot of Emerson quotes. I found this collection in Barnes and Noble and felt a bit disappointed that it was so short. I was looking forward to these pieces, but it turns out that for me, this is a Brussels sprouts book. Part of it is the style, which is flowery and ecstatic and puts me off, somehow. Part of it’s the attitude, which is dogmatic and tunnel vision-y. There are fascinating ideas and confounding assertions, so I read it first, write my reactions in the margins, and move on to…
2. The cocktail: The Portable Dorothy Parker. This is a collection of short stories, poems, reviews, and letters, so the pieces are short and self-contained. In a way this is the perfect nightstand book, except that the writing is far from soporific. Back to the plate I go, for…
3. The pasta: Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle. Dave, who is an avid cyclist, found this book when we visited Beacon Hill Books and Cafe this summer. (Terrific, terrific place; if you’re passing through Boston you should check it out.) Once he’d finished it, he passed it along to me. I love this kind of nonfiction deep dive and am finding out all kinds of cool stuff, including that in the late 1800s bicycling was so popular and so controversial that there were newspaper articles that blamed this habit for breaking up families and corrupting general morals! Now there’s just one thing left on the plate…
4. The protein: George Solti’s Memoirs. Solti was one of the great conductors of the twentieth century. He headed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when I lived in in that city, so I got to see him work in person. What that man could do with an orchestra simply by raising an eyebrow! Solti’s narrative voice is as vivid and engaging as his conducting. I’m about a third of the way through and finding the account of his experiences in Hungary, Germany, and Switzerland in the years around World War II to be compelling, and terrifying.
At first I enjoyed watching the stack dwindle. It gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I started with a quick read, a collection of James S. A. Correy stories set in the Expanse universe. I finally finished a history of opera that had been in the pile, about 75% done, for a couple of years. I sped through a collection of interviews with famous singers. Eventually it started to feel a bit like the time I went on the Atkins diet and cut out the carbs, when I lost weight (temporarily) but also kind of hated my life, especially when passing a bakery.
My original thought was to get the nightstand books down to one—no, down to zero, and then make a new pile. But at the moment I am, as often happens, rebounding to the other extreme. My stack is too small. I need a nightstand that’s a nightly feast…a party…a buffet! So now I’m on the hunt for appetizers and desserts.
What would you suggest? What’s on your nightstand?
the jeanSpace 