16 Best Books to Read Before Bed (Nothing Will Keep You Up)

Bond kept notes at Landour for years, and this is a selection of them: a bird that comes back every March, the smell of rain on a hot road, a friend who visits and says nothing useful, a short complaint about being asked for advice. Some entries run half a page and some run a single line. Reading it feels like sitting with a man who stopped trying to be interesting and became interesting by accident. It is the only book on this list you can open at any page without losing anything at all.

Ten stories about a bear who eats too much honey, a pig who is frightened of most things, a donkey who has decided life is disappointing, and a boy who is kind to all of them. If you last read this at seven you will find something else in it now, because Milne writes adults into it quietly: the anxiety, the false confidence, the friend who steers every conversation back to himself. Nothing bad ever happens. The worst outcome in any chapter is mild embarrassment, and someone always turns up with a snack.

In 1949 Helene Hanff writes to a secondhand bookshop in London asking for cheap editions of books she cannot find in New York. Frank Doel writes back. They keep writing for twenty years, about books, about rationing, about parcels of eggs sent across the Atlantic, and eventually about their lives, without ever meeting. The letters are short, a few of them only four lines, and every one ends properly, so you can shut the book anywhere and nothing is left hanging over you.

Narayan built a fictional town called Malgudi and filled it with people who could live on your street: an astrologer frightened of a customer, a man who talks his way into a job he cannot do, a schoolboy, a snake charmer, a postman who holds back bad news. Each story runs five to eight pages and ends without a moral, which is the trick of the whole book. Narayan never raises his voice, and the effect at night is like listening to somebody tell you about the neighbours until you drift off.

An accident left the professor with a memory that resets every eighty minutes, so each morning his housekeeper is a stranger he has to meet again, and each morning he greets her by asking her shoe size and finding something interesting hidden in the number. He is kind to her son, whom he calls Root, because the boy's flat head reminds him of a square root sign. The book moves at the pace of a household: cooking, baseball scores, a proof written on a scrap of paper. Ogawa holds the temperature level from first page to last.

Mole abandons his spring cleaning, meets Rat by the river, and spends a year messing about in boats, which is most of the book. The rest belongs to Toad, who discovers motor cars and becomes a public menace, giving the story its only real plot and its funniest chapters. Grahame wrote it for his son and the sentences show it: long, unhurried, thick with picnics and weather. The famous chapter about the piper is strange and dreamlike, and half of all readers skip it, which I think is a mistake.

Cranford is a small English town where the men have mostly gone and the women who remain keep up appearances on tiny incomes. A lace collar is ruined by a cat. A cow is dressed in flannel. A retired captain reads Dickens aloud and the town argues about him for weeks. Gaskell published the chapters in instalments, so each was built to be read on its own and then set aside for a fortnight, which makes this the best-engineered bedtime book of the nineteenth century, entirely by accident.

The narrator, who is never named, records her days: bulbs that refuse to grow, a cook threatening to leave, a neighbour who mentions her son at Oxford in every single conversation, a husband who falls asleep behind the newspaper at nine. Delafield wrote it for a magazine, so the entries are dated and tiny, sometimes two lines long. It is a comedy about the gap between what a woman says at dinner and what she writes down that night, and almost a century later the gap has not narrowed.

Mayle and his wife buy an old farmhouse in the Luberon, and the book runs month by month through their first year there: the mistral in January, truffle hunters who explain nothing, builders who promise to come after Easter and turn up in August, and a startling number of meals described in full. There is no conflict beyond a blocked chimney and a neighbour with opinions. It works at bedtime because your brain gets sunshine, food and slow company, and is asked to hold on to none of it.

A small advertisement offers a medieval castle in Italy to those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine. Two women who barely know each other answer it, then recruit two strangers to split the cost: a beautiful one who is exhausted by being looked at, and an elderly one who disapproves of everybody. What follows is a month of flowers, food and thawing. Von Arnim wrote comedy about interior weather, so the changes are small and private, and the largest event in the book is a husband arriving unannounced.

Precious Ramotswe sells her late father's cattle, buys a small house and a tiny office, and opens a detective agency in Gaborone. The cases are domestic: a missing husband, a dentist who may not be a dentist, a daughter who is probably lying. McCall Smith is not interested in suspense so much as in Mma Ramotswe's judgement, so the chapters give as much room to tea and to the correct way of speaking to an elder as to the mystery itself. One thread involving a missing child is genuinely dark, and it is resolved.

Wohlleben managed a forest for years and writes about what he watched there: root systems that pass sugar to a stump which should have died long ago, beeches that grow slowly on purpose, the fungal network under the soil that shifts nutrients between neighbours. Chapters run three to five pages and each holds one idea. He states some of it more confidently than the research does, which other scientists have argued about in public, so I read it as a forester's account of his own woods rather than as a paper.

Viv has spent her life killing things for money and she is done with it. She sells her sword, moves to a city that has never heard of coffee, rents an old stable and turns it into a cafe. The book is about hiring people, fixing a roof, inventing a cinnamon roll and worrying whether anybody will walk in. A threat from her old life does show up eventually and is dealt with in a few pages. Baldree described it as a novel of low stakes, and he was not being modest.

In a basement cafe in Tokyo there is a seat that sends whoever sits in it into the past. The rules are strict: you cannot leave the chair, you cannot change what already happened, and you must return before your coffee gets cold. Four people take the seat for four different reasons, and each story runs about seventy pages. It began life as a stage play and it shows, in a good way, since almost everything happens in one room and is carried by conversation.

Juliet Ashton gets a letter from a farmer on Guernsey who has ended up with a secondhand book that once belonged to her, and the exchange grows into a correspondence with most of an island. The society in the title was made up on the spot as an excuse when its members were caught out after curfew during the occupation, and then it turned into a real one. The novel is written entirely in letters, so it moves quickly, and the war arrives sideways, through what people happen to mention.

In 1922 Count Rostov is tried by a Bolshevik tribunal and confined to the Metropol hotel in Moscow for the rest of his life. He moves into an attic room and builds an existence out of what is left to him: a barber, a chef, a wine cellar, and a friendship with a nine-year-old girl who knows the building's hidden corridors. Decades of Soviet history happen outside while the count arranges dinners inside. Towles writes long, formal, funny sentences, and the book is perfectly happy to sit still for fifty pages.