Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot.

Adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath in. Let it out slowly. And off we go.

This week we're reading a selection from excursions,

a collection of essays by Henry David Thoreau, first published in 1863.

Let's relax and join him on a winter walk.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds

or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer's effort

lifting the leaves along the live long night. The meadow mouse has slept in his snug

gallery in the sod. The owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp.

The rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watchdog has laying quiet on the hearth and the cattle have stood

silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as if it were its first, not

its last to sleep, save when some street sign or woodhouse door has faintly creaked upon its hinge,

cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work.

The only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars,

advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together,

but where it is very bleak for men to stand.

But while the earth has slumbered,

all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending as if some northern series reigned,

showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

We sleep and at length awake to the still reality of a winter

...