The Sleeping Almanac

You are not meant to finish this book.
Twelve of the best loved stories ever told, retold slowly enough to fall asleep to, and retold the way their first tellers left them. A lamp in a cave and the two genies who serve it. A little mermaid who trades her voice for the shore. A pumpkin, a rat, six mice, and a glass slipper on a palace stair. A hedge of briars that opens by itself after a hundred years. A girl on a yellow road in a pair of silver shoes. A bamboo cutter's daughter who came down from the moon, and the queen who began it all by stopping every story at dawn.
These retellings are drawn from Perrault at the court of the Sun King, from Andersen's Copenhagen, from Barrie, Carroll, and Baum, from the old ballads of the greenwood and the Ballad of Mulan, from the tenth century Japanese tale of the bamboo cutter, and from the Thousand and One Nights, in the same warm, scholarly voice as The Sleeping Almanac sleep story channel and podcast. Each chapter grounds its tale in the real world it came from, the court, the city, the riverbank, the page it was first written on, then lets the story carry you gently down toward sleep. If you only know the film, the original will surprise you, and that is half the pleasure.
One chapter is plenty for a night. Lower the light. Read until you drift. There is nothing here you need to remember.
Book Three of The Sleeping Almanac. Book One retells the Norse myths. Book Two retells the myths of ancient Egypt.