A book guaranteed to induce sleep?

There are more than a few books that are, at least unofficially, guaranteed to put their readers, and possibly listeners as well, to sleep. But that is usually an unintended objective of the author and is, therefore, not recommended in lieu of, say, sleeping pills for insomniacs. They are also usually not bedtime reading of choice for children who take a long time to nod off. However, the nightly ritual that often puts exhausted parents to sleep before their children clearly needed a saviour. Thus, the 26-page book called The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep by a Swedish behavioural psychologist and linguist named Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin that reportedly does the trick in under 15 minutes was destined to be the bestseller that it has become. The idea of getting children to participate in the story is brilliant, and is probably only to be expected from a person experienced in writing management and leadership manuals.

As the parents are even taught how to read it — including indications of places in the story where the peroration should be slow and punctuated with yawns — the most reluctant tot is guaranteed to fall asleep. Perhaps the gentleman can follow it up with similar clever participatory books guaranteed to send all kinds of other pesky people — adults, naturally — into the Land of Nod pronto.