Reading List

My belief in life is that there is no problem in the world that won't be helped by reading a book about it.

This is borne out by my reading list from the past year or so. Some selections:

Taking Charge of Your Fertility
Pregnancy Loss: A Silent Sorrow
Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife
The Birth House
Pregnancy Sucks
The Midwifery Option: A Canadian Guide to the Birth Experience
The Doula Advantage
Birthing From Within
The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth
Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn
What to Expect the First Year
The Happiest Baby on the Block
The No-Cry Sleep Solution
Sleeping Through The Night and Other Lies



That's a whole history of my recent life right there, isn't it? I love that.


Recently some other books have joined my list: books that tackle the hard questions about motherhood, as the first generation of feminists become mothers and confront the fact that we can't really "have it all" as we've been promised.


The Mommy Myth: How the Idealization of Motherhood has Undermined All Women
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
The Mask of Mother Hood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything, And Why We Pretend It Doesn't
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
Mothershock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It
It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters


Love love love these books. Love the questions they raise about the societal role of motherhood, and the knowledge that I'm not the only one to find this job mind-numbingly tedious and yet utterly all-consuming at the same time. The books don't offer easy answers, but they do assure me I'm not alone, and often phrase my own dilemmas and difficulties in much more articulate language than I'm able to produce. Which is why I'm an amateur blogger and they are published writers, I guess. At least I can claim to be well-read, right?