Nothing beats reading in bed

There are three things I really like to do in bed. One of them is read. My bedroom is a perfect reading spot. It’s quiet. It’s non-judgmental (more about this later). It’s cozy, and it’s free of gadgets. There is no television, no computer, no telephone. The only vaguely electronic equipment in sight is a small boom box surrounded by an eclectic selection of CDs chosen for their ability to provide background music without being offensive. Keith Jarrett is good at this. Miles Davis is not.

I don’t always play music. Sometimes, I prefer the sounds of our household’s late-night shutting down rituals. Beneath my window my husband, Zeke, is playing with the dog before bringing him inside. The sound of the ball bouncing off the side of the house so Elvis can leap up and catch it reminds me of the marathon handball games we used to play when I was growing up in Detroit. That’s when I started reading in bed late at night. Back then I was supposed to be sleeping, but the streetlight outside my window was bright enough for me to circumvent my mother’s rules and finish the last few pages of “Little Women” or the latest offering from Nancy Drew. The rhythm of the ball is almost hypnotic, and I snuggle down under the spread or my granddaughter’s Dora the Explorer blanket, feeling as safe and happy as I did then, and as curious.

That’s why the nonjudgmental thing is so important. In any other room, I am bound by considerations that do not apply in the bedroom. Most of the rooms in my house demand a certain seriousness of purpose. When I’m reading in my office, it’s usually research for a book or a play. History. Feminist theory. Geography. Serious stuff.

When I’m reading in the room where I meditate, I’m trying to connect with a higher power and follow my breath to a more peaceful place, not a quest to be taken lightly.

In the kitchen, dining room and living room, reading is likely to be a shared experience: The New York Times, a letter from home, a book the other one will never read which must then be read aloud a paragraph or two at a time because the information or insight contained therein has so delighted one or the other of us that the experience must be shared.

But not all reading experiences are meant to be shared. Or to be serious. Or to be subjected to the judgments and queries of anyone but the reader herself.

Take, for example, my former addiction to the really trashy gossip rags. Yes, I speak disparagingly of them now, but only after realizing that if I added up all the money I spent on four or five of them a week, I would have enough to buy a water buffalo from the Heifer Project and change a hard-working farming family’s life. But before this realization, I spent many lovely moments at the end of long hectic days listening to Zeke and Elvis outside, and enjoying the completely fictionalized lives of celebrities (Angelina Jolie and her children were my favorites) in the pages of In Touch and Life & Style and the Star and, yes, from time to time, even the National Enquirer. (How could I resist a story that claimed Tyler Perry and Oprah were lovers on holiday in Italy?)

I did draw the line at the Globe. Although I demand the right to read the trash of my choice, even I draw the line at alien babies and Martians taking over the world. But it’s my line, voluntarily drawn, not one I have to pretend to respect if friends drop by and see me in the living room, surrounded by bookcases full of Langston Hughes and Alice Walker, reading such patently prurient pop culture drivel. I’d have to disavow Angie and her family in order to protect my serious writer credentials, but in the bedroom, there is no chance of strangers dropping in, so I follow the Jolie-Pitts shamelessly from one continent to another and feel sorry for the invasion of Halle Berry’s privacy even as I turn to find the first photos of her baby girl.

But that’s all in the past since I’ve been saving up for that water buffalo, so lately I’ve been reading books by old ladies. Really old ladies. The last one I read, “Somewhere Towards the End,” by Diana Athill, won the Costa Prize for biography when its author was 90. Some of the ladies are writing autobiographically, like Ms. Athill, and some are writing fiction, like Virginia Ironside, whose novel “No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club ” deserved a better title.

It’s interesting to see the things I’m experiencing at this moment in my life as a full-grown woman working their way into the plot of a novel where the heroine is already well into her 60s and still having adventures, love affairs, family drama and fun. They make me feel glad to be exactly where I am in this life, in this moment, without even worrying about what my breath is doing.

The other good thing about these old ladies is that they are all such fully alive, absolutely sensual women that they invariably put a smile on my face as I hear my husband coming down the hall, probably carrying his own book under his arm and a couple of glasses of Chianti. The problem is, once he arrives, it’s hard not to engage in one of the other things I really like to do in bed —- talk to my husband about what I’m reading.

Atlanta-based playwright Pearl Cleage is the author of, among others, “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” which is being performed May 6-31 by True Colors Theatre Company (truecolorstheatre.org).