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From "Goodnight Songs."

I don’t know about yours, but my bedtime reading does not generally — ever, actually — include books about falling asleep. This should seem strange only to young children, for whom the provision of books about sleeping and not sleeping has captured a large slice of the picture book market. Dr. Robert Needlman, who revised and updated Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” once told me that the purpose of bedtime stories is to give the imagination a kind of way station between wakefulness and sleep that facilitates an easier slip into unconsciousness. (We were talking about young children, but I think this goes for all of us.) So books for bedtime, sure. But why about? Four new books, swaddled in practically identical shades of sleepy-time blue, attempt to make a case for the genre. Some do a better job than others.

“Goodnight Songs” is a collection of verses, most previously unpublished, by Margaret Wise Brown — herself of course the author of the bedtime classic “Goodnight Moon,” itself the progenitor of countless imitators eager to become the next baby shower staple. This collection won’t be it — where “Goodnight Moon” is all concentrated strangeness and mystery, the poems in “Goodnight Songs” are individually repetitive and carelessly developed sprouts of whimsy. With each of the 12 selections illustrated by a different children’s book artist — including Sophie Blackall, Dan Yaccarino, Eric Puybaret and Melissa Sweet — the book lurches more than progresses from spread to spread. According to an editor’s note, Brown had conceived these poems as song lyrics, and a compact disc of pallid but grating renditions is duly included in the kind of package that suggests you’re getting more for your money than you actually are.

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From "The Big Book of Slumber."

From the Italian team of the writer Giovanna Zoboli and the illustrator Simona Mulazzani, and translated by Antony Shugaar, “The Big Book of Slumber” is a humbler and more consistent effort, cataloging in rhyme and picture the sleeping arrangements of an entirely peaceable kingdom. Fancifully so, what with the camels in bunk beds and doves on the chaise longue. The juxtapositions are funny but unfrantic, gentled by the sweet couplets (“Dormouse and badger in beds side by side. / ‘I like your pajamas,’ friend badger confides”) and piquant but restful paintings. The matter-of-factness with which a fox sleeps under a star-strewn baby-blue duvet beneath the purple sky offers both strangeness and comfort. The book lacks shape — you could put the pages in any order and not notice the difference — but does not want for mood.

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From "Tippy and the Night Parade."

Lilli Carré's “Tippy and the Night Parade” is of a size and style more intended for independent reading than sharing. Toon Books is a grandchild of Raw magazine, the underground comics venue founded in 1980 by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, now the art editor of The New Yorker and Toon’s publisher and editorial director. While respectably hardcover and didactically appended with suggestions for reading guidance, “Tippy” uses the paneled art and speech balloons of comics and displays its downtown roots through an offbeat color palette (cantaloupe, chocolate and gunmetal blue), blithe generalization of form and a bed-headed heroine who looks as much the hipster gamin as she does a little girl. The narrative, though, is completely old-school children’s book: An uncomprehending Tippy is chastised by her mother for the messy state of her bedroom, filled as it is with a peacock, bunny, turtle and various detritus from the natural world. Who will not see that these are but souvenirs of Tippy’s somnambulistic wanderlust? She makes another trip the very same night, this time counting among her haul a goat, crab and bear. While the details of Tippy’s nighttime walk are mildly funny — and maybe mildly is as funny as you want at bedtime? — there’s not really enough going on here to make a child want to go through the story more than once. Maybe the rules are different for comic books (although we certainly reread them with avidity), but any bedtime book worthy of the name needs to work its magic over and over again, like bedtime prayers.

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From "Hannah's Night."

The little girl of “Hannah’s Night” is also a night wanderer, but her territory is the secure confines of her home, and she’s wide awake. As with her previous books, “Emily’s Balloon” and “The Snow Day,” the Japanese author-illustrator Komako Sakai finds picture-book drama by letting a young child’s perceptions — of a new balloon, unexpected weather — play out unfiltered by adult perspective. Hannah finds herself surprised to wake while it’s still dark, and at a bit of a loss for what to do, goes off to have a pee (with cat Shiro companionably doing his own business in the litter box next to the toilet). She then raids the fridge (milk for Shiro, cherries for her), looks out at the moon and daringly borrows her big sister’s doll right from under her sleeping nose, securing the sister’s music box and some art supplies while she’s at it. It’s a big night. Rather than throwing about some nocturnal nonsense to give Hannah something to do, the book allows the girl’s own resourcefulness to provide the story, demonstrating a respect for toddlers and their world matched by the pictures, serious blues and purples warmed by comfortably scratchy lines and anchored by protectively rounded borders. Exciting but safe, Hannah’s world is one that would-be dreamers will welcome as a first step into sleep.

Whatever it takes. But there’s no reason to think kids need to read or hear about bedtime at bedtime any more than you do. If we recognized that children read for the same reasons as adults — the walk into dreamland being among them — the books we intend for their pleasure might look a whole lot different.

GOODNIGHT SONGS

By Margaret Wise Brown

Illustrated. 32 pp. Sterling. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)

THE BIG BOOK OF SLUMBER

By Giovanna Zoboli

Illustrated by Simona Mulazzani

Translated by Antony Shugaar

28 pp. Eerdmans. $16. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)

TIPPY AND THE NIGHT PARADE

Written and illustrated by Lilli Carré

32 pp. Toon Books/Candlewick Press. $12.95. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)

HANNAH’S NIGHT

Written and illustrated by Komako Sakai

32 pp. Gecko Press. $17.95. (Picture book; ages 2 and up)

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