There is serious reading and there is bed reading. Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul. It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provide by desk, hard chair, note-taking and coffee-drinking. It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline. Bed reading, however, is pure unalloyed pleasure. The mind is neither taxed nor stretched or improved, but entertained.
I came across Heidenry's Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease (St. Martin's 2009) by chance at a local library. I would never buy a book like this because at best it is worth reading only once. But its skillful noir recounting of a 1953 kidnapping and murder most definitely held my interest over the few days it took me to read it in those delicious intervals lying abed before nod-off. But I have to wonder about books that anatomize depravity while eschewing all moral judgment. A large topic this, one that I will get around to eventually.
I now hand off to Janet Maslin's NYT review.