Imagine writing an intentionally boring book: where do you start? After all, most people who write boring books do it unintentionally. How would you know you weren’t being accidentally interesting?
A new volume This Book Will Send You To Sleep promises to be not just consistently boring, but optimally soporific: “Each page is guaranteed to be devoid of excitement,” according to the introduction. “All challenging or stimulating elements have been removed, and we have endeavoured to set and design the text in such a way as to befuddle the mind, inducing a state of hypnotic dreaminess and languor.”
The chapters are short, dense and, judging from the table of contents (Railway Gauges: an Overview; Economic Statistics from the First Two Five-Year Plans in the Soviet Union; A Few Facts About Roundabouts) unapologetically dull. But could this stuff put me to sleep more reliably than, say, the biography of Mitt Romney already on my shelf?
The early signs are promising: on the first night I barely make it through a one-page entry before my eyelids droop. I sleep soundly until about 3am, when I suddenly find myself fully conscious and unable to stop thinking about the Political Crisis in Belgium (2007-2011). A little knowledge – even extremely boring knowledge – is a dangerous thing.
The next night I skip to a chapter called How the Pyramids Were Built. This may sound accidentally interesting, but the essay is an exercise in numbing repetition (“And then a fifth block was dragged carefully across the sand and moved laboriously into the correct position”). After that I examine a spread of identical-looking drawings of bees under the heading Spot the Difference. I can’t, so I count them instead. There are 419.
A week on, I’m finding the book often intriguing and a little addictive. For every line perfectly judged to knock you unconscious (“Farmers and ecologists are among those who can benefit from a full understanding of the comparative rates of reproduction in insect pests”), there’s another to keep you up (“There are no canals on the island of Guadalcanal”). You may well fall asleep after a page or two, but you’ll be back the next night for more.
- This Book Will Send You to Sleep by Professor K McCoy and Dr Hardwick is published on 10 May (£9.99, Ebury Press). Buy a copy for £8.49 from theguardianbookshop.com
