Non-stressful non-fiction for night time

December 14, 2020 2:46 AM

Over lockdown, I've found that I sleep best when reading non-stressful writing in bed. What is your favourite soothing, accessible, and ideally funny non-fiction? Ideally historical.

A book that very much fits the bill is The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, about Western contemporary classical music.

While I do enjoy Bill Bryson because his books are soothing and entertaining, as a PoC I have found those of his books I have read to be very Western-centric - specifically about the UK and USA. It'd be nice to read works with a more global outlook.

I am looking to read some entertaining, interesting and illuminating non-fiction at nighttime which focuses on some aspect of human civilisation or history, even if it's quite niche. I'm sure this is a huge genre but not one I am familiar with. I'd like to learn things, but I'd also like to be soothed/entertained.

I realise that human history is NOT by large soothing or entertaining, but I'm not looking to grapple with harsh truths of the human condition at night while I am trying to sleep. I would however be happy to spend that time learning more about the history of chairs.

posted by unicorn chaser to Writing & Language (25 answers total)

Frank Muir's autobiography"A Kentish Lad" might work for you. Funny and touching account of his life creating radio comedy for the BBC. A lovely book.
posted by Zumbador at 3:04 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

I really like Mark Kurlansky for this. I think Salt: A World History is my favorite, and I also more recently enjoyed his book about paper.
posted by Mizu at 5:04 AM on December 14, 2020 [11 favorites]

I second Mark Kurlansky, I love his book about cod

My very favorite is Pasta for Nightingales: A 17th-Century Handbook of Bird-Care and Folklore

I also love Corvus: A Life with Birds
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 5:36 AM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

Color by Victoria Finley
posted by veery at 5:52 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

Mary Roach writes pop-scientific books that are both educational and hilarious.

In the vein of "History of Chairs" - What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew.
posted by Dotty at 6:13 AM on December 14, 2020 [6 favorites]

Rain by Cynthia Barnett is about exactly that (its subtitle is "a natural and cultural history").
posted by andrewesque at 6:21 AM on December 14, 2020

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane. This is about AI, so ... recent history. Very readable, informative, and funny.

Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Although the subject matter sounds stressful -- this is about an Inquisition to stamp out the Cathar heresy -- the majority of what you read is basically the interviews of every single person in a village so that you get this incredibly up close, every day picture of people's lives in this one place in the 1300s. Including the juicy gossip about who the head priest is banging. At times it's like you're reading a dry summary of a sitcom. (Sorry to overlook its academic qualities, any medieval historians.)

Similar on a smaller scale, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Carlo Ginzburg (who also wrote The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller).
posted by automatic cabinet at 6:23 AM on December 14, 2020

Great question. What popped into my head immediately is Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler.
posted by maddieD at 7:22 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

Some non US/UK focused:

Julian Barnes: The Man in the Red Coat
Belle Epoque Paris seen through the life of a well-known doctor at the time - though there is some stuff about Paris-London relations. Page-turner and beautifully written.

Patrik Svensson: The Book of Eels
Eels are truly fascinating and mysterious creatures.

Fredrik Sjoberg: The Flytrap
A life collecting hoverfiles on an island in Sweden

Michael Coe: Breaking the Maya Code
Readable story of how the Maya script was deciphered.

Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia
Siberia as seen through a unique angle
posted by vacapinta at 7:32 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle fits the bill for non-stressful, beautiful historical non-fiction. I've mentioned this book in other book-threads. It's really fantastic.

You might also like The Creators and The Discoverers, both by Daniel Boorstin. These are more sweeping, but are reminiscent of the old TV show Connections, which showed how This One Thing led to This Other Thing, and so on.

Finally, for pure comfort on a cold night: The Outermost House by Henry Beston.
posted by jquinby at 8:00 AM on December 14, 2020

One of my all-time favorites: Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky. Lansky received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work.
posted by JohnFromGR at 8:15 AM on December 14, 2020

I really enjoyed Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper. Scanning the reviews on the Goodreads page also reminded me how much I liked The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary by John Simpson. (It also introduced me to a term for books about lexicography: dic-lit, which I am absolutely dying to find an excuse to use.)
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 9:17 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Potawatomi nation and professor of botany, is one of the most soothing and thoughtful books I have read. She is a specialist in moss, and writes just spectacularly about the ways indigenous knowledge should inform science and interactions with the environment.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:04 AM on December 14, 2020 [9 favorites]

I really enjoyed Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson (a frequent Gastropod contributor), about the history of eating tools and utensils.
posted by suelac at 11:05 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is Heathcliff a Murderer, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy, etc. - literary mysteries from novels of the nineteenth century, in this case by John Sutherland. I read them a few years ago and while retrieving the links was delighted to see he'd also written similar works specifically for the Dracula and Frankenstein novels.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 11:57 AM on December 14, 2020

Even if you don't like his music, "The Real Frank Zappa Book."
posted by rhizome at 12:11 PM on December 14, 2020

I was really sad when I finished The Corfu Trilogy by Gerald Durrell. I learned about it because of a public TV show in the US called The Durells on Corfu.

Despite the bland name, it's one of the funniest and most soothing set of books I've ever read.

It's noted naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durell's autobiographical account of his widowed mother moving her children from the rainy British Isles to the sunny Greek island, Corfu.

The natural wonders and beauty he describes are so lovely! The only non-soothing thing is that our relations to nature are considerably more uneasy than they once were. The original titles are My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods.
posted by rw at 1:01 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

John McPhee is a master of creative non-fiction on a wide range of topics. He is very entertaining--and soothing. He has written a 100 or so pieces for the New Yorker and books based on some of those pieces. Here is his bio from the New Yorker site. Publishers Weekly offers Books by John McPhee and Complete Book Reviews. Delightful bedtime reading.
posted by Nosey Mrs. Rat at 6:26 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]

This is covering fairly recent history, but I cannot recommend Because Internet (a book about the linguistics of online communication, both past and present) highly enough. I used it for soothing bedtime reading and it fit the bill perfectly.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 8:11 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

Here to second Dottie’s recommendation of Mary Roach’s work.
posted by mollymillions at 9:01 PM on December 14, 2020

Seconding "Color". Thank you Veery for reminding me that book exists. I haven't seen it in years!
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 10:00 PM on December 14, 2020

I would recommend:
A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
How Music Works by David Byrne (yeah that David Byrne)
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (technically fiction, but jam-packed with all sorts of whimsical odds and ends)
posted by cross_impact at 3:02 PM on December 15, 2020

I never tire of recommending the entirely fabulous Black Hole Blues, about the development of LIGO.

Also good: pretty much anything by Sue Hubbell, especially A Country Year and A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them.

Finally, I haven't personally read Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay yet, but it's on my list because of recommendations by other MeFites.

Sleep well!
posted by kristi at 8:36 PM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Here to second John McPhee. Some of his work - especially the geology stuff - can be a little dense, but Uncommon Carriers and The Control of Nature are both delightful and pretty straightforward reads. La Place de la Concorde Suisse is a trip down the rabbit hole, an entire book about the Swiss Army, told mostly from the vantage point of a handful of misfit soldiers. Oranges is another short-ish book that is about the Florida orange industry in the 1960s.

I have the same issue with bedtime reads. Two others that worked great for me recently: Every Tool's A Hammer by Adam Savage (memoir plus some advice for makers of all kinds), and Meander Spiral Explode by Jane Allison, which is about the structure of stories. Meander takes a little while to get going - appropriate - but was a real pleasure.
posted by sockshaveholes at 4:33 PM on December 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Remembered one more - Robert Macfarlane writes about nature and language. I only read his Landmarks, but I suspect his other books are equally excellent and am looking forward to reading these too. Great bedtime reading!
posted by Dotty at 9:54 AM on December 21, 2020