Connor Martin:

Dreams are travel, and bedtime is the start of a journey. So, the books that I pile on my nightstand achieve a similar effect to what I’m going for in my forthcoming novel, The Silver Fish, a literary espionage thriller set in contemporary Ghana. They get the reader walking down a foreign city’s streets or crashing through a dense jungle; they put us in positions inaccessible during our ordinary days but which dreams offer complete freedom to explore.

They don’t always have to be novels, though. Some of my best-loved pre-bed reads are nonfiction. In Denis Johnson’s Seek, you mine for gold in Alaska with the author of Jesus’ Son. In Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, you embed with Marines fighting in Fallujah. In Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, you experience firsthand the contradictions of modern China. And in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, you witness the resilience of the poorest residents of Mumbai.

All extraordinary, mind-expanding reads. But novels, of course, offer their own endless menu of journeys. You could find yourself in a nightclub in pre-Castro Havana in Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba or driving beneath the glittering lights of Bahrain in I.S. Berry’s The Peacock and the Sparrow or dodging the KGB in Moscow in Paul Vidich’s The Poet’s Game or strolling the corniche of Marseille in Elliot Ackerman’s Sheepdogs. Or you could be in any of the globe-spanning locales in the works of John le Carré or the original master, Graham Greene.

What matters to me is not so much the setting or even the plot but the flavor of possibility, of improvisation, of courage and daring.

So, I like to read before bed like I’m settling in for a red-eye flight. The lights dim, the engines start. The rumble of the air as the plane bobs through the darkness tugs your mind downward... and the next thing you know, it’s morning, and the sun is coming up on the ocean. The cabin lights are switched on, the tray tables returned to their upright positions. You are descending into a new city, a new day — bright and fresh and full of mystery.

[Photo by Jeremy Varner.]

Connor Martin is a writer and former senior U.S. national security official, most recently serving as deputy director of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States at the Treasury Department. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and splits his time between Washington, DC, and Brooklyn. The Silver Fish is his first novel.