2024, Interrupted Sleep, and the Magic of Audiobooks
By Rebecca J. Holden
I’m one of those people who have always needed my sleep—no I mean, really needed my sleep. And it’s not just about getting my morning coffee. I have always needed eight-plus hours of sleep to be somewhat human in the morning. Just ask my friends--I’m a bit of a monster if I wake up too early or stay up too late or, now that I’m a woman in my 50s, wake up and can’t go back to sleep. A while ago, I started reading books in the middle of the night when I woke up. My Kindle with its built-in backlight was my go-to. I could read books without waking up my husband or the dog or whomever. It helped, but I found I actually had to put down the Kindle to fall asleep. Then I discovered the magic of audiobooks as sleep aids. I found that I could set the “sleep” timer on my audio book, listen to it via headphones, and fall asleep! This practice got me through many sleepless nights in my mid-50s, when waking up at 3 or 4 am became a regular thing.
The books I selected to listen to were almost exclusively mysteries and thrillers, all by women authors—because I wanted to read as many women authors as possible. Thanks to my library audiobook apps, such as Libby and Hoopla, I have an almost endless supply of these books. This year, I have enjoyed listening to mysteries by Ruth Ware, Lucy Foley, Laura Lippman, Alice Feeney, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Kate Atkinson, Liane Moriarity, Angie Kim, Liz Moore (Thanks, Obama!), Paula McClain, speculative fiction’s own Elizabeth Hand, and many others. I made a conscious decision not to listen to science fiction in the middle of the night—except in rare circumstances—because for me, reading science fiction means I need to PAY ATTENTION. Afte rall, analyzing science fiction is part of my job—it’s what I do and also what I teach. When reading other genre fiction, like thrillers and mysteries, missing a few pages or specifics here or there, because I fell asleep and didn’t go back far enough when I started listening again was all good. If I didn’t like the book or it didn’t capture my attention, I stopped listening, went into my apps, and found something new. (By the way, I recommend all the authors listed above.)
When I starting reading and listening to mysteries, I didn’t expect much; I know, I know—after years of explaining how science fiction is “literature” worthy of study and doing all I could do to legitimize academic studies of science fiction, here I was, not expecting too much from mysteries. To be clear, I did expect to find good writing but not feminist, socialist, progressive stories rife with social critique. Of course, I was wrong. Certainly some mystery series and novels are what I might call fluff, but so many are rich, well-written critiques of our world—I found very few simple whodunits.
In fact, I would argue that many of the novels I have listened to cross into the speculative; some are overtly speculative, such as Hand’s mystery books or Atkinson’s time-leaping series. Some simply hint at the supernatural or mystical—I’m thinking of Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake. The television adaptation brings the mystical to life. However, I would also argue that how I listen to these novels makes each one of them speculative—at least the ones that keep my attention. If my nighttime practice is working, I will listen, fall asleep, wake up, listen again, fall asleep, and perhaps come back to the book for many nights. Time becomes slippery. I might hear a later part of the book and realize I missed something I want to know about, so I go back to an earlier place in the book. I listen, determine if I’ve heard it before—sometimes I don’t know—and then decide whether I want to listen (again) or move ahead. Mostly it doesn’t matter what order I hear the details in or whether I learn the specifics of the case—it all comes together eventually. Or it doesn’t and I move on to another mystery, happy to have followed the characters through their paces, relationships, and discoveries.
In light of the recent election, I feel that my waking life is mimicking my nighttime sleep book-listening pattern. The trajectory of our timeline is not linear. The sense of deja vu hits me again and again. The Orange Menace is president, again? Reproductive rights are a thing of the past? LGBTQ+ people are being pushed back into the closet? I could go on and on. As with my audio books, I am dipping in and out of a timeline that is at best disjointed and more likely, at its worst, is backwards and dystopic. However, I can’t seem to fall asleep—there is no sleep timer. Since Nov. 5, 2024, I have listened to full books some nights; the stories feel more real than reality at times.
Recently, when searching for a new mystery, I came across a new Lauren Beukes novel, Bridge. I knew before I started it that it was science fiction—but it was also a mystery. It was about alternative realities and traveling between them—moving between the many selves we might have out there. It was about finding yourself, your past, your present, and it jumped around in time, space, narrative voice, and identity markers. And in spite of my general desire to be “awake” for science fiction, it was the perfect “middle-of-the-night” book. I was awake for hours listening; or I wasn’t. I might’ve hallucinated parts of the story. I might’ve put myself into one character or another. I might’ve listened to some passages once, ten times, or never. Still, it transported me as all good fiction should do.
It also reminded me that we are not stuck here, not yet, in this post-Nov. 5, 2024. So while I tend toward pessimism—thinking I will never fall sleep or I will never finish my work or I will always wake up tired—I still find myself looking to fiction and art to create new ways to experience the world, to experience time, and to find something worth waking up for.
Rebecca J. Holden (she/her), a fan and scholar of feminist, African American, and YA science fiction, is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has published essays, book chapters, and reviews on topics ranging from young adult Afrofuturism to feminist cyberpunk, and points in between, in The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction, Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, LA Review of Books, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, and others. With Nisi Shawl, she co-edited and contributed to the Locus-nominated Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (Aqueduct Press, 2013. She is also the editor of Re-Generating WisCon: the WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 8 (Aqueduct Press, 2014).
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