Some people sleep with pillows and blankets, and, if they’re lucky, a cuddle bunny of a sort.

I sleep with books.

Not a book, singular, but multiple books of multiple genres, heaped in a long pile between me and the other side of the bed.

I find this to be easier than trying to keep books strategically stacked on a bedside table, which is never wide enough to maintain quantity and the choices needed on a given night, which for me is fiction and nonfiction, memoir and poetry, cookbooks and the ultimate escape, kid lit.

While the bedside table presents a problem if the book I want is at the bottom of the stack, keeping chosen tomes in an equanimous pile at my side means I can easily pull one out for my 3 a.m. wake-up without toppling all the others.

Like rolling over to nurse the baby in the family bed, the book is right there.

Clearly, the bed-bound library can create a different set of problems.

My collection can be so heavy at times as to keep me — and irritated others, as the case may be — from moving our feet under the blankets.

One ex-cuddler was convinced my bed library was a way of keeping a wall between us.

As it turns out, he’s long gone, and I’m still sleeping with a 600-page biography of the Dalai Lama, “Charlotte’s Web” and a book of Mary Oliver poetry, to name a few.

Clearly the concept of reading in bed itself needs no apology.

Reading in bed provides a healthy means of escape at the end of the day.

Reading in bed slows the heart and releases tension, say the reading-in-bed experts. Carried out regularly, reading in bed can set the stage for sleep, signaling the brain that it’s time to to slow down.

Reading in bed is common; according to a recent survey of U.S. adults commissioned by The Sleep Doctor, 41.3% of all U.S. adults read as part of their bedtime routine. All age groups in the survey read at least three nights a week, on average, with 18-to-24-year-olds reading the least, at 3.4 nights per week. Adults ages 55 and older read the most, at 4.9 nights per week. Favorite genres, according to Penguin Random House, are romance, history, fantasy, fiction and the classics.

Admittedly, while reading in bed needs no introduction or justification, the bed library is something different.

This may be especially true if the space is shared with aforementioned others who don’t have the same affinity for sharp corners poking them in the back at night.

As for me and my bed books, the behavior may keep me connected to my grandmother whose headboard was a shelf of Reader’s Digest Condensed books that left a mound of overflow onto her bed.

It could could be argued that she, too, was trying to keep distance between herself and my grandfather in their later years, though by then they had separate sleeping quarters.

My theory is that, with a boatload of children and a demanding full-time job, the only time she had for herself was when the house was dark and quiet.

Like me, she liked to crawl into other worlds at day’s end, which was the only time she could take a break from her own. Like me, she found books to be intimate, unconditional, always there with emotion, connection and a feeling of friendship that she wanted to keep near.

The reach of the book can be long-lasting, especially for people like me who read many books at the same time.

I start more books than I finish, which means the same book may lie with me for weeks, months, years.

Which brings into view another important purchase to keep nearby: bookmarks.

No excuses here. These will fit in the drawer of the bedside table.

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