Some books you have to think about when and where to read them. I took Stephen King's Insomnia with me on vacation and learned after one night of sleeplessness that I couldn't read this right before I planned to slumber.
It's a huge book of big ideas that begins with sleep. On the back side, there's a photo of King wearing a T shirt that says "We Never Sleep." He looks bemused and very tired. In the book, he writes about different sleep disorders and many different ideas for cures ranging from acupunture and hypnosis to eating honeycomb right before bed. I imagine he has tried them all.
After that, I read the the book in the daylight, often with the TV on -- all those football bowl games and no Tivo in the hotel provided an invitation to read during all the commercials. The insomnia turned out to be a springboard to the big issues. The book is really about the natural cycles of life and death, and what happens if those are tampered with, and the energy that we all have and how it's expressed and used. I hadn't read Stephen King for a long time, just as I haven't seen a scary movie in forever, because, as I discovered again with reading this book, scary movies and books keep me up at night. But I really wanted to read Insomnia, because it was such an ambitious book that made you think and wonder, not the things you would expect from a popular author such as King, but there it was, and I was glad to have found it.
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