Unless I'm engaged in research, I don't usually undertake more than one prose reading project at a time. Despite its long stretches of tedium, I've kept my commitment to The Birth of the Modern, which has included bringing it to bed with me. But this weekend I finally decided that something must change. It's not that the book is too "heavy" for bedtime; rather, the book is too heavy for bedtime. If I prop it on my stomach,  the bottom paragraph of each page gets stuck in the fold of the sheet. If I try to hold it in the air, my wrists hurt. Even tomes have their down sides, as you can see.

To alleviate this problem, I decided to choose another bedtime book; and as I nearsightedly cast my eyes around the room, I landed on Heidi. This is the edition that nestled among the volumes of my parents' matching set of "Great Books for Children"--books such as Tales from Shakespeare and Robinson Crusoe--and it was the only spine with a one-word title. At the age of three or four I would sit up at the lunch table staring dreamily at the shape of the word and saying to myself, "Heidi, Heidi." I didn't really know how to read the word; I only knew what it looked like. To this day I retain the distinct memory of recognizing words by shape only, and I think perhaps that this is why I turned out to be a good speller: because I think of words not as sets of phonemes but as visual patterns.

So, filled with sentiment, I took this familiar volume of Heidi  to bed with me. But when I opened  it to the 1961 introduction, written by Adeline Zachert, "formerly state librarian, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," I was greeted by horrible news: 

In this edition of Heidi the delightful atmosphere of the story, the colorful descriptions, and the human appeal have been retained. The story has been slightly adapted so as to give pictures of life in a foreign country, but it is free from troublesome foreign idioms and allusions.

What! How is it that until this point I had no idea I'd been devoting my memories to a bowlderized version of the novel? Where are all those troublesome foreign idioms and allusions? Ay-yi-yi.

However, it was too late; I was already in bed, so I read the damaged goods anyway, and I even managed to enjoy myself, though I still don't understand how the Alm-Uncle can toast rounds of goat cheese till they're golden brown without using any bread to hold the cheese. Why don't the rounds disintegrate into a melty mess? But Heidi's bed in the hayloft, with the round window looking straight into the stars and the three fir trees outside blowing in a perpetual mountain breeze, remains one of my ideal sleeping places. (I also have a weakness for descriptions of houseboats and overnight trains.)