Hello, welcome to the Bore You to Sleep podcast, the podcast that will hopefully help you get to sleep.

I am going to read an open source book, one that is not particularly interesting, but one that is

hopefully boring enough to get you to sleep.

Tonight's book is called The Awkward Page written by Henry James.

It is a novel that was first published as a serial in Harper's Weekly in 1898, 1899, and then later in 1899, it was published as a book.

I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it makes you sleepy.

Tonight's readings, we'll start with the preface of the book.

I recall with perfect ease the idea in which the awkward age had its origin, but re-perusal gives me pause in respect to naming it.

This composition as it stands makes to my vision, and will have made perhaps more to that of its readers,

so considerable a mass beside the germ sunk in it, and still

possibly distinguishable, that I am half moved, to leave my small secret undivulged.

I shall encounter, I think, in the course of this copious commentary,

no better example, and none on behalf of which I shall venture to invite more interest,

of the quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject matter to expand and develop

and cover the ground when conditions happen to favour it I say all surely when I speak of

things planned in perfect good faith for brevity for levity

for simplicity for gossosity in fine and for an accommodating irony I invoked

for my protection the spirit of the lightest comedy, but the awkward age was to belong, in the event, to a group of productions here reintroduced, which have in common to their author's eyes the endearing sign that they asserted

in each case an unforeseen principle of growth. They were projected as small things,

yet had finally to be provided for as comparative monsters.

That is my own title for them, though I should perhaps resent it if applied by another

critic. Above all in the case of this piece before us, the careful measure of which

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