Jane Robins

Can’t sleep? Try a boring audiobook

The art of picking the right pillow talk

  • From Spectator Life
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I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating. Like so many of us, I’m nodding off to the sound of an audiobook.

Crime novels work well, as long as they are not overly gruesome or suspenseful

I was already enamoured of Richard E. Grant who’d, on other late nights, read me Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea. The plot unfolds at a gentle pace and nothing unduly dramatic or loud happens – there are no car chases or football chants. Of course, the writing is beautiful and therefore soothing, and you don’t mind hearing the same bits twice. Hearing stuff twice is inevitable as, each night, you rewind, trying to find the point at which you faded out last time.

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