BTT: Day and Night?

Booking Through Thursday asks:

“I couldn’t sleep a wink, so I just read and read, day and night … it was there I began to divide books into day books and night books,” she went on. “Really, there are books meant for daytime reading and books that can be read only at night.”

- ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, p. 103.

Do you divide your books into day and night reads? How do you decide?


I go through periods of dividing my reading. I am definitely a poly-reader. I am always reading more than one book, and dividing my time - night, lunch, train, after work - it is the best way for me to cope with all the books I am reading. For a while I can convince myself to limit my reading before bed and designate books as night reading, but then I break my promise and start reading a fast paced book for the pure joy of it. My night books tend to be classics or more serious books, because those tend to be slow reads that I can stop at any time. I spend more time mulling over the words rather than being caught up in them. I have insomnia, so I have a lot of “quiet time” to fill, but if I am really into a book, I tend to read past the time that I get tired enough to sleep. I really don’t have a lot of discipline over my reading (I am an addict after all) and the only way I can control this is if I get books I can put aside when I get tired. As well as non-fiction, classics and “slow books” I also add autographed or expensive books to this list, because I don’t take those out of my room. At the moment my night reading is a Gail Carriger’s Changeless because I found a signed copy at Galaxy and I don’t want to ruin the cover by reading it on the train. If I do decided to split up my day vs night reading, I normally try to finish Wuthering Heights, but then I get a new book and I am too excited to put it down.  When I was trying to finish On The Road I did so by designating it as my lunch time read. I had all these other books I would have preferred to read, but it has always been one on my "must read in my lifetime" list. I had only 100 pages to go, so I banned all other books at lunch time until I had finished it.