Which we have all done, idly or assiduously, thoroughly or haphazardly, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, and may well do until death do us part from the teetering pile of novels we have been reading in bed since last summer, drooling on the pages as we fall asleep, propped on one arm, our glasses surfing down our noses, until the moment that we snap awake suddenly and for a split second wonder where exactly we are, why we are naked, and who drooled on Dostoyevsky.
But there are many happy hours when we are stark raving awake, and find ourselves reading happily in the broad beam of the bed — in the morning here and there, when no one is around to sound the sluggishness alarm; and in the afternoon sometimes, before a nap, for 20 delicious inky minutes; and occasionally in the evening, if cooking duties have been evaded successfully for religious reasons, and there is a parenthetical hour when you can curl up and knock off a hundred pages of, say, the endless tomes of W. L. S. Churchill, who apparently never had an unpublished thought, the poor mule.
Some books should be read in bed — Proust, for example, who seems to have spent most of his adult life writing in bed, and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, which was composed in bed, and which eerily lends itself to being read there, and which has probably been read aloud by supine parents to their sleepy children more than any book in our language, except the stoner classic Goodnight Moon.
And some magazines, I notice, are best read in bed, for murky reasons: The New Yorker, for example, and National Geographic, maybe because they are small enough to handle easily and clean enough not to leave inky evidence in the bed, which is why we don't read the Sunday newspaper in bed anymore, having learned our lesson that time Blondie Bumstead's face was discovered imprinted on the pillow, boy, was that hard to explain.
Moving on, there are the simple pleasures of reading in bed, to wit being bare of foot and sans of trousers, and there are the logistical conundra, to wit getting the book propped securely amidships and persuading the reading lamp to stop nodding sleepily (band-aids are good, although I know of people who use gum and duct tape), and there