Not so very long ago, a bored group of friends was regaled by someone in their midst about the liberating power of sitting on the toilet. They, as I noted before, were all bored. It was late one Friday night and they were all sitting around staring at each other, trying to ignore the feeling of depression that comes about when the party is over; once-verdant fields of conversation are singed to anaemic whiskers of grass, all the oxygen has just about been sucked out of the room and everybody should simply go home. This person claimed that he so enjoyed his toilet time, felt so at peace there, that he often falls asleep. After the inevitable barks of laughter subsided, one smart aleck muttered, “Well, if you sleep on the john, I suppose you poop in your bed.”

(For the faint of heart, I promise that this little meditation isn’t a cover for scatological gross-outs and such.) Apparently he is given to long stretches of slumber there — hours, sometimes — something the rest of the friends worried was perhaps emblematic of a rare sickness of some sort. Surely, this couldn’t be good for his lower extremities, they thought. It was probably narcolepsy, someone pointed out, and probably harmless. Only it really wasn’t. Sleep Boy actually shed all his clothes before his visit to Mr Sandman. The bathroom, weird though it may be, is his place of tranquillity, his fortress of solitude, if you will.

I know, right?

A more conventional activity that’s been taking place loo-side for a longer time, though, is reading. Talk about your effective multi-tasking! Surveys have allegedly shown that two-thirds of North Americans have admitted to reading in the bathroom. (It’s an intellectual pursuit, actually, and nothing to feel embarrassed about. True story: The Scott Paper Co did a survey a few years ago, and it revealed that most of the people who read in the bathroom either have advanced degrees: master’s or doctorates.)

All I can say is thank God for Ron Shaoul, who in 2009, decided to get the dirty on the matter, once and for all. Shaoul, a doctor specialising in paediatric gastroenterology, had decided that toilet reading was a woefully neglected area by scientists, and so did a study about it, the results of which, to date, may be the most scientific to shine light on what many view as a dirty little secret.

He questioned people of all ethnicities, shapes and forms and found out what we know in our hearts to be true. At some point, many of us have tucked that unread newspaper, that novel we’re determined to finish or that fashion magazine we need inspiration from beneath our arm and entered the holy place where, for some precious moments at the time of day most convenient, we reign, kings and queens as it were, upon our thrones.

But people have always used the lavatory for catching up on reading. The anonymous author of The Life of St Gregory, for example, noted that the toilet of the middle ages offered the perfect solitude for “uninterrupted reading”.

Today’s bathrooms are often specifically designed with books in mind. Face it, books lend to the décor of a room most of us, excepting the aforementioned Narcoleptic Sleep Boy, really wants to be. My mother always decorated all our bathrooms with wicker baskets that we could stock with all kinds of reading material. Back in the day, Roman baths also contained libraries for people to pore over scrolls while they were there.

Often, when people complain to me that they can’t find time to read, I recommend a book with one’s morning constitutional. It’s a pragmatic way to cover a lot of ground in our fast-paced world. After all, it’s estimated that we spend between two to three years of our lifetime on the toilet. But, for reasons not immediately evident to me, this is a topic people don’t like talking about. There’s always embarrassed tittering and the subject is quickly changed. But the truth is, reading while riding the porcelain bus is an effective time-management strategy.

People probably get hung up on hygiene concerns, I suppose, and the purists among us may think reading should be a separate activity from dumping a grumpy.

But Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an admitted toilet reader, was quoted in a recent UK Guardian article as saying there’s a theoretical risk, albeit a slim one, of transfer to your reading material. However, “we don’t need to get anal about it. The important thing is to wash your hands with soap after using the loo to get the bugs off”.

Indeed!

Listen, one group of people who toilet-read is authors. And no writer, apparently, was more of a connoisseur in the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller, who is best known for The Tropic of Cancer. He is reported to have expressed the belief that some books, Ulysses, for instance, could not be fully appreciated except on the white throne of grace. The bathroom environment, he felt, was one that actually enriched certain substantial works, um, extracted their flavour, as he put it. Miller went so far as to recommend toilet types for certain authors. For reading the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, he suggested a plain country toilet, “a little outhouse in the corn patch, with a crescent sliver of light coming through the door”.

Maybe it’s because my bathroom is so claustrophobic and tiny, but, personally, I prefer reading books in bed, lying down on the floor, at the hairdresser’s, on a long plane ride, or even in a line at the bank. I try to leave the toilet for lighter fare, your Marie-Claires and InStyles, and what-have-yous. But that’s just me. And that’s, frankly, more than you need to know.

But I’ll just leave you with this. In 2006, Toronto-based magazine Now asked several writers about their bathroom reading. The author Meg Wolitzer, whose book, The Wife, had a profound impact on me, admitted to reading in her bathroom. Her answer to what she read there was a gem: “A combination of George Eliot and the instructions on the Tampax box. One is a bit more complex than the other — but I’m not saying which.”

And there, dear reader, you have it.