Textbook Sleep

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. In this episode we’ll read aloud selections from Psychology of the Stock Market by G. C. Selden, published by Ticker Publishing Company in 1912. Subjects may include “The Speculative Cycle,” “The Panic and the Boom,” and a chapter mysteriously titled, “They”—“They...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. In this episode we again explore A Text-Book of the History of Painting by John C. Van Dyke, first published in 1894. This time, we’ll be reading about painting in 19th-century France. I don’t need to tell you that this is one of the most glorious centuries of pai...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. In this episode we’ll explore A Text-Book of the History of Painting by John C. Van Dyke, first published in 1894 by Longmans, Green, and Company. How can the history of painting be boring, you may wonder. In the right writer’s hands, anything is possible. In fair...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past 49 episodes, it’s that Hegel is the touchstone, the sine qua non, the alpha and the omega of aural sleep inducement. His writing is so powerful a soporific, it should be regulated by the FDA. It wouldn’t surprise me i...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Tonight, we return to the thorny thickets of Hegel—this time, The Phenomenology of Spirit , published in 1807. For all I can tell, the entire book is one big put-on, a practical joke on philosophy students that makes no sense at all, a jumble of random words and s...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Tonight it’s The Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Don’t get excited by the word “confessions.” If like me you were expecting a big tell-all about 18th-century shenanigans, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Rousseau did, however, break some teeth off a c...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Fortunately for sleep lovers, it’s Ethics by Baruch Spinoza, Part III, on the origin and nature of emotions. Oh, it’s dull. Wonderfully dull. Intensely dull. We will hear the word “postulates” bandied about. I admit that I am not entirely sure what they are, but I...

It’s summer. The time of the year for sunburns. Seals and Crofts. And reruns. So I looked back upon our collection of boring tomes and was quickly drawn to Immanuel Kant. Even among his Textbook Sleep peers, he is exceptionally boring. That’s why this recording is so short—you only need a low dose of him to fall asleep. Hello and welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, please d...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. I’m sorry to say that we’re once again featuring The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., this time on the scintillating subject of contract law. Well, I suppose it is interesting, even exciting, to those who understand its every nuance and thus make big eleph...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. To help you sleep, we read aloud the boring texts that once put you to sleep in school. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is again our choice. In Volume 6, the decline is fully underway. One poignant example—there is nowhere to get a decent espresso, at any price, because espresso won’t be invented un...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. To help you sleep, we read aloud the boring texts that once put you to sleep in school. Like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . A.K.A. the decline and fall of your insomnia. This is my second reading from it. The entire History is approximately 1.5 million words long and would take me some 200 hours...

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Talk about too much information. Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. To help you sleep, we read aloud the boring texts that once put you to sleep in school. This famous six-volume tome has been making readers nod off since 1776. A good editor could have whittled it down to 150 pages or so. Or a short...

Hello and welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid. Our goal is simple—to bore you to sleep by reading aloud textbooks of little or, frankly, zero interest to anyone. Tonight I’ll continue reading The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It’s uncommonly dull. Sensationally dull, even. If the sensation generated is sleep. It is, however, a textbook central to our understanding...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was published in 1881 and has been making law students nod off ever since. It turns out that tort law has nothing to do with tortes, a dessert Wikipedia describes as “a rich, usually multilayered cake that is filled with...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. And what could be more boring than statistics? Willford I. King, Instructor in Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, might take issue with that. He is the author of tonight’s snore-o-rama, The Elements of Statistical Method , published in 1924. It’s so dull,...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. When we released our first two episodes of Hegel’s History of Philosophy, sleep scientists around the world noted a steep spike in the hours and quality of sleep people were getting. They were baffled by its cause, but of course Textbook Sleep listeners will know...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. But you know who can’t fall asleep? Lighthouse keepers. Too many lives at stake. Still, they were forced to read Instructions to Light-Keepers , published by Authority of the Light-House Board in July, 1881. It’s so exquisitely boring, it’s amazing that shipwrecks...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Unfortunately, we return to Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Last week’s episode was described by some as deeply, even bottomlessly boring. I would be remiss by not going there again. A west coast listener writes: “How do you not fall asleep while reading these thin...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. We have a doozy for you tonight—it’s going to be an especial challenge to stay awake as I read it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s History of Philosophy is impenetrable. And it includes his opinions on all the most boring philosophers who ever picked up a quill. D...

The H-ion concentration method of standardization! The selective action of anilin dyes! The mechanism of entrance of pathogenic organisms into the body! These and more, MUCH MORE, await you in this episode of Textbook Sleep , where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. In this case, it’s The Fundamentals of Bacteriology by Charles Bradfield Morrey, published in 1921...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Or, should we say Handbook Sleep ? For tonight, we will read: The Handbook of Railroad Construction; for the Use of American Engineers, Containing the Necessary Rules, Tables, and Formulae, for the Location, Construction, Equipment and Management of Railroads, as...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid, where we read aloud boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. We continue with another sleep-inducing essay by Emerson. By listening to it, you will join the hundreds of thousands of students who have struggled heroically to make their way through it, thinking there might be a quiz. But there is no quiz here at Textbook Slee...

Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast, where we read aloud boring, public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. A listener recently informed us that she “used to read Ralph Waldo Emerson as a sleep aid, while in college.” It happened that the Textbook Sleep library contained a collection of his essays. One glance made it clear that Emerson’s writing was indeed perf...

Here’s a question posed by The Book of Wonders , published in 1915: “How many have ever given a thought to the question of where rope comes from and how it is made, or realize what a variety of uses it is put to, and how dependent we are upon it in many of the everyday affairs of life?” The answer is easy. No one. And that makes it the perfect story to fall asleep to. Not gently. But hard, instant...

Watching paint dry—a famously boring exercise. Tonight, we will surpass that level of tedium, by hearing how paint is made. Welcome to Textbook Sleep , the Maximum-Strength Sleep Aid podcast. We read extremely boring public-domain textbooks to help you fall asleep. Get full access to Pieces of Jim at jimnolan1.substack.com/subscribe