Books

This month’s nightstand is pretty disorganized because… I’m not sure exactly why. But does it really matter? Suffice to say that you’re getting photos of the books I currently have out of the library, but they’re not in any specific order. I’ve started some, browsed others, and haven’t looked at still others. I might read some of them before next month. I might not.

This month, I read:

• The Wonder Years by Tanya Remer Altmann (editor)
  The American Academy of Pediatrics guide to your baby, toddler, and preschooler’s development. Overall, a fascinating book and one I greatly appreciate since I get a lot of moms asking me “is this normal?” (Of course, I only reassure if I know for sure that it is normal – and encourage them to talk to their child’s doctor if they have concerns.) On the other hand, this book could have been copy-edited much better – there were several distracting incidents of subject/verb disagreement that rather drove me nuts. Also, the section on ADHD was laughable. The author declares that there is no objective way to diagnose ADHD but then declares that “it is a biological disorder.” Really? That’s very confidence inspiring. (Not that I don’t think there isn’t any such thing as ADHD, but without some sort of objective criterion and biological mechanism, I find it hard to announce that it is biological. I suppose in some ways, it might be similar to depression, which many state is a biological disorder based on the knowledge that certain drugs can help it – but at least there’s an objective criterion my doctor uses to determine whether I’m experiencing major depression or not before he prescribes my drugs.)
• Behold Williamsburg by Samuel Chamberlain
  Photos and commentary on Colonial Williamsburg from the 1940s. I can’t wait to go and see how things have changed and stayed the same!
• He Who Saw Everything: The Epic of Gilgamesh retold by Anita Feagles
  A children’s version of the tale, published in 1966, this retelling features occasional friezes and occasional folded paper illustrations in the Sumerians style. It’s interesting how the author chooses to tell the particularly lascivious parts of the story story. Makes me wonder how I would retell the story if I ever decide to act on the idea I had to retell some myths (and have my talented sister-in-law illustrate them.)
• Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer
  Another delightful Heyer title – this one with some Gothic overtones. I enjoyed the story of an independent but destitute niece gone off to live with her benevolent but secretive aunt only to discover that something is definitely amiss in the ancient household.
• The Insider’s Guide to Williamsburg and Virginia’s Historic Triangle
  Getting excited for this trip!
• Don’t Throw that Out! A Pennywise Parent’s Guide to Creative Uses for Over 200 Household Items by Vicky Lansky
  As if I needed any encouragement to not discard something potentially reusable. Honestly, there were maybe a handful of decent reuses for stuff that would otherwise be trash – most were “turn on the vacuum to get baby to sleep” kinda stuff. Meh.
• What to Expect when You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff
  Interminably long, generally dry, biased toward medicated birth. There are better general introductions to pregnancy, even if this is the most popular.
• Parenting Magazine’s Baby Must-Haves
  Another groan-inducing volume for inducing parents to buy way too much for their new baby.

Working on:

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoeyevsky
  Reading along with the Reading to Know Classics Book Club – and definitely not going to finish anytime this month.
• Grace-Based Parenting by Tim Kimmel
  Almost done reading this and discussing it with my sister-in-law. Lots of thought-provoking material.
• 1628 Country Shortcuts from 1628 Country People by Roy Reiman
  Because I like that sort of thing.

On the docket for next month:

• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
  I’m hosting September’s Reading to Know classics book club selection – and I’m delighted that we’ll be reading George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. After so much pregnancy reading (and while I’m working my way through the rest of Brother’s Karamazov), it’ll be nice to relax with a meaningful children’s fantasy. I hope many more of you join me this month at Reading to Know!

Don’t forget to drop by 5 Minutes 4 Books to see what others are reading this month!

So there’s been all this reading I’d been doing the past couple of months that I couldn’t include on my Nightstand because I was trying to keep mum about becoming a Mom – but now that we’ve announced Baby Garcia’s expected arrival, I can deluge you with the last several months of reading.

Back in May and June, I read:

• Best Baby Gear by Sandy Jones and Marcie Jones
  Parents: Baby Gear from Birth to Age 3 by Parent’s Magazine with Debra Wise
  Consumer Reports Best Baby Products by Sandra Gordon
  Interesting. Terrifying. I’m a minimalist when it comes to baby stuff and feel like some of the safety stuff is going too far (with some definite exceptions.) Basically, I spent my way groaning through these supposed essentials – and suddenly getting why so many people think they can’t afford to have children.
• The Smart Mother’s Guide to a Better Pregnancy by Linda Burke-Galloway
  Basically, a guide to second-guessing your doctor. I struggle to come up with what I think about this. I want women to be educated regarding their own care. I want them to know when to ask their doctors to look deeper. There’s nothing wrong (in my mind) with women having a basic understanding of what could go wrong during pregnancy and what to do about it – but Burke-Galloway’s advice almost always leans on the side of more intervention rather than less – which is the exact opposite of my personal stance on childbirth management. I can easily see a woman reading this book and then going out and insisting that her doctor give her every test in the book and every intervention available, never mind the risks of intervening unnecessarily.
• Homebirth by Shiela Kitzinger
  I can’t help but love Kitzinger, with her strong pro-home-birth stance and her straightforward descriptions of how to set up for a homebirth. Kitzinger is decidedly pro-home-birth, with a similarly decisive dislike of overmedicalized hospital birth. If you’re thinking of a homebirth or a birthing center birth, this is a great resource to help you interview a midwife and set up a strong plan. If you’re pretty sure you’re not interested in a homebirth, you’re likely to get frustrated with the author’s clear bias.
• Choosing a Nurse-Midwife by Katherine M. Poole and Elizabeth A Parr
  A nice overview of midwifery in America and things to take into consideration when choosing a midwife. While this is definitely written about choosing a nurse-midwife, the many questions included within are worth asking your certified professional midwife if you’re choosing one of those instead (Wichita’s hospitals are very anti-midwife and there is only one practicing nurse-midwife in town. She, unfortunately, only delivers in the hospital – leaving me with CPMs as my only option for a home birth.) I appreciated reading through this book prior to interviewing my midwife.
• The Essential Homebirth Guide by Jane E. Drichta and Jodilyn Owen
  A very nice guide for women who want to give birth at home. This covers choosing a provider, the distinctives of the midwives model of care, other people you might want to have involved on your home-birth support team, how certain circumstances would be dealt with by homebirth providers, and so on. In general, I think this is a very good book. I do have some quibbles with the authors’ tendencies to represent herbal, nutritional, and other “nontraditional” (in a medical sense, although generally “traditional” in the midwifery world) treatments as truth without showing any substantial evidence to support these (one particular bit about eating a raw cucumber a day to keep preeclampsia away struck me as laughable.)
• The Doula Advantage by Rachel Gurevich
  A description of the roles of a doula, how to hire a doula, and lots of stories about doula care. It sounds like doula care is a very good thing for a lot of women – but reading this book only cemented my opinion that doula care is not for me.
• Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta by Ina May Gaskin
  You can’t talk about midwifery in America without talking about Ina May Gaskin. In general, I found myself nodding and mm-hmming through much of this book as Gaskin complains about the high intervention rate and lack of accountability in modern obstetrics and calls for a better model of care (midwife-based care with obstetricians who are committed to doing what’s best for mom and baby) that protects women and babies. That said, some things about this book really creeped me out – specifically, the birth stories of women who delivered at “The Farm”. While these women raved about the care they received and the community they had, the fact that almost every story included some midwife or other women just showing up during labor uninvited did not sit well with me. While these women were able to labor without unnecessary interventions, they weren’t laboring on their own terms. In fact, one woman talked of laboring in the bathroom with the door closed because she really didn’t like having other people around – why didn’t her midwife kick everyone else out so the woman could labor however she wanted without being confined to the bathroom?
• Liz Lange’s Maternity Style by Liz Lange
  A standard fashion sort of book, complete with photos of disembodied clothes “mixed and matched” for every event, quotes from style celebrities, and tips that make you wonder what sort of world the author thinks you live in. I enjoy this sort of thing and liked browsing through it, but gained next to nothing in practical advice.

This month, I read:

• Beginning Life by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald
  I mentioned last month that this was an “opposing viewpoints” sort of book – but found that wasn’t the case. Instead, this is an attempt by a single author to fair-mindedly address the various ethical issues surrounding conception. In general, Boleyn-Fitzgerald does a good job at being fair – but she definitely seems to lean towards the interventionist side on stem cells, abortion, etc. – and underrepresents the non-medical arguments against those practices.
• Husband Coached Childbirth by Robert A Bradley
  Daniel and I are attending a Bradley childbirth class (our first meeting was last night), but that doesn’t mean that I really know that much about the method. In fact, my only familiarity with the method is that it’s husband coached, that it has a good success rate for unmedicated births, and that a family friend told my mom that she and my dad “basically did Bradley” even though they never did it officially. Since my mom is pretty much my childbirth hero (7 natural births, 5 of them at home, 3 of which were unassisted by a midwife), I figured it must be a decent method. But I might as well read up on it before our first class. Thus, reading this book. We’ll see how things go – on first reading, I feel a little rebellious against the “one right way” to do things :-)
• Buff Moms-to-Be by Sue Fleming
  A good basic guide to fitness during pregnancy. As far as I am familiar with current exercise guidelines during pregnancy (and I have done a fair bit of looking in both the medical literature and in the recommendations of various professional organizations), this book gives tips in line with the latest research and recommendations for exercise in pregnancy.
• Bumpology: the myth-busting pregnancy book for curious parents by Linda Geddes
  An amusing and informative book set up in Q&A style. I was pleased with the rigorous way in which Geddes looked at the evidence and evaluated it objectively – being careful to describe how the strengths and weaknesses of a study should inform the conclusions we draw based upon that study.
• Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
  Read for the Chronicles of Narnia Reading challenge because I thought I hadn’t yet covered it – but then I realized I had, so I moved on to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (which I have not yet completed.)
• The Stone Age by Patricia D. Nerzley
  A children’s guide to the various Stone Age hominids. The aspect I found most interesting about this book was how the author took great pains to discuss how difficult it is to interpret artifacts from early hominids – before making bold statements about what these hominids looked like and how they lived. As could be expected, this book has a decidedly evolutionary slant and often confuses hominids with humans (something I have a quibble with – while all humans are hominids, I do not believe that all hominids are humans or “precursors” to humans.)
• Pregnancy Chic by Cherie Serota and Jody Kozlow Gardner
  This is a book of the nineties, when pregnancy fashion was just emerging (that is, pregnancy fashion that looked like normal people clothes). The authors sold/sell? a “pregnancy survival kit” which contains four fashion essentials – and this book is basically an extended advertisement for their kit (and your husband’s closet.) It had a few tips that I found interesting, but most of it was terribly dated – leggings are considered an essential, your husband’s denim shirt a must, and a sweater tied around the waist always in fashion. Not so much a decade into the new millenium.
• The Maidenstone Lighthouse by Sally Smith O’Rourke
  Ended up being much to raunchy to recommend – and nowhere near as compelling a story as The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. However, this marks me done with this author.
• Christmas in Denmark and Christmas in Spain by World Book
  More “research” into Christmas around the world.
• When We Were on Fire by Addie Zierman
  A memoir of belonging to the 90s Christian subculture, of losing faith, and of finding it again. Very difficult to process the thoughts that went through my mind while reading this. Read my jumbled thoughts here.

Books in Progress:

• Grace-Based Parenting by Dr. Tim Kimmel
  I suspect that this book was written in response to popular authoritarian parenting manuals marketed to Christians (the Ezzos’ Growing Kids God’s Way and the Pearls’ To Train up a Child) – and I definitely tend to agree more with its grace-filled approach than with either of those rigid parenting techniques. A lot of the topics addressed in this book are very future-tense for me (since our baby is yet unborn, and this book is more geared toward parents of preschoolers and up), but I have found it to be enjoyable and thought provoking. I do have one beef with this book – and that is that the author doesn’t always extend the same grace to parents that he asks them to extend to their kids. A parent could finish this book and feel even more pressure to perform, not receiving the grace that God gives to imperfect and fallible human parents.
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
  Reading along with the Chronicles of Narnia Reading challenge, also at Reading to Know. So far, I’ve written one post of reflections on how this title is different from the other Narnia tales.
• What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff
  Because every pregnant woman pretty much has to read this one, right? Kinda blah, in my opinion (but maybe that’s because I already have a lot of knowledge when it comes to pregnancy – it’s kinda my job). The author is not an advocate for natural childbirth and kinda reminds me of the hand-out-condoms-in-school crowd – “Yeah, you could be have a natural childbirth (be abstinent), but really, you might as well just get an epidural (use a condom).”
• Origins by Annie Murphy Paul
  A layman’s look (and NOT a prescriptive formula) at the science of fetal origins.
• The 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
  Reading with the Reading to Know Classics bookclub and enjoying it greatly so far.
• The Babycenter Essential Guide to Your Baby’s First Year

Don’t forget to drop by 5 Minutes 4 Books to see what others are reading this month!

I’ve been returning books to the library once I’m done reading them (a good habit, you know) – and therefore hadn’t been noticing that I’ve actually done a decent bit of reading this month. However, I’ve got a whole slew of books due (without renewals) the first of July, so I’m still cutting it close with plenty!

This month, I read:

• Bottled Up by Suzanne Barston
  A treatise from the “fearless formula feeder” arguing that breastmilk isn’t the best option for every mother and child. A valuable look into the psyche of those who “failed” at breastfeeding – but her arguments against breastfeeding are less than stellar. Read my full review here.
• The Heart’s Frontier by Lori Copeland and Virginia Smith
  Amish romance meets Wild West, set right here in Kansas. This was a rather fun version of the standard Amish romance, since the primary differences between the plain way of life and the cowpoke’s life wasn’t technology but…well…other things. I enjoyed this book far more than I’ve enjoyed most of the Copeland novels I’ve read recently, but I’m not sure exactly why – it was still nominally Christian fiction, a relatively sappy romance with little character development. But, I enjoyed it. So there you have it.
• King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rader Haggard
  Adventure is not my usual genre, but I’ve read along with all of the Reading to Know Classics Bookclub so far this year and I don’t intend to stop now. I’m awfully glad I did read this one, which was a gripping tale of a 1800s elephant hunter who is hired by two English gentlemen to lead them to the (generally presumed to be mythical) mines of King Solomon, in search of one gentleman’s brother, who set off on an expedition to the same locale and was never heard from again. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel!
• Cotillion by Georgette Heyer
  When a rich uncle tries to convince his grand-nephews to marry his ward, things don’t exactly turn out how anyone expect. This is an absolutely delightful romp through Regency England – and officially my favorite book by Heyer. Check out my full review here.
• The Upside-Down Christmas Tree by Delilah Scott and Emma Troy
  A collection of various families’ strange holiday traditions – many of which entail avoiding family functions, thumbing their noses at “Christmas culture”, or celebrating personal obsessions. It kept me moderately entertained during our wait at urgent care when Daniel had pneumonia, but, as a Christmas lover myself, I wasn’t too impressed.
• The Man Who Loved Jane Austen by Sally Smith O’Rourke
  Eliza (quite unwisely per her investment banker boyfriend) buys an antique writing desk on a whim. She isn’t expecting anything spectacular of it, but finds herself on a grand adventure after she finds a couple letters hidden within – an open one from an F. Darcy, addressing himself to Jane Austen, and a sealed one addressed in Austen’s own handwriting to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Thus begins a lighthearted and fantastical tale of a modern day man (whose family was not Austen fans, thanks to her strange co-option of their family name and the name of their American state) who fell in love with Austen. This was a fluffy read, but enjoyable – it reminded me a little of “You’ve Got Mail” meets “Kate and Leopold”. There is a bit of potentially objectionable content – premarital sex (in the modern day) is considered the norm and there’s also some language – but it wasn’t racy like I feared it might be. I’m glad this caught my eye during a recent library trip because I enjoyed it rather a lot.
• Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
  A very nice basic introduction to economics – without the math. It’s supposed to make economics interesting for people whose eyes glaze over when they start hearing economic talk, but since I’m not one of those, I don’t know how well it succeeds at it’s goal. Nevertheless, it is an engaging overview of economic principles. Read my full review here.
• Christmas in Colonial and Early America and Christmas in Finland by World Book
  I love Christmas and I love reading about how other cultures celebrate it. These two books from World Book’s extensive Christmas around the world collection were fascinating and managed to transport me back to my childhood, where I took copious notes on worldwide Christmas traditions and tried my hardest to incorporate them into my family’s Christmases.

In Progress:

• Beginning Life by Miriam Boleyn-Firtzgerald
  One of those books that tries to shed light on controversial subjects by excerpting articles from a variety of sources. This one deals with assisted reproductive technologies as well as abortion and emergency contraception.
• Behold Williamsburg by Samuel Chamberlain
  A photograph-filled tour of Colonial Williamsburg as of the forties, when restoration was still in full swing. Reading in preparation for our Garcia family trip to Williamsburg in October.
• Gilgamesh: a new English version translated by Stephen Mitchell
  It’s been a long time since I last read the Epic of Gilgamesh – and I’ve forgotten how racy it is. This is, however, shaping up to be an excellent and readable translation (I might have to remember Mitchell’s name and put this translation up with Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf as favorite renderings of ancient mythologies.)
• The Maidenstone Lighthouse by Sally Smith O’Rourke
  I checked this out when I realized that I could close out O’Rourke with just two books if I jumped on it now. This one is not anywhere as interesting as The Man who Loved Jane Austen. It’s told in first person from the heroine’s point of view and if she mentions making love one more time… She hasn’t been explicit, which is the only reason I’ve kept reading, but I’m considering calling it quits on this one anyway. I only have so much reading time, and this does not seem worthy of my time.
• When We Were On Fire by Addie Zierman
  A memoir of belonging to the nineties teen evangelical culture, of falling away from the faith, and of returning. My sister-in-law asked me if I’d read it because she wanted someone to discuss it with. And there is definitely discussion to be had here. While I have not had a falling away or returning, I identified strongly with Addie’s experiences as a teen in the nineties. This has been a tough book to read, inducing bits of nostalgia combined with equal parts distaste for the “on fire”, revival-happy, experience-seeking evangelicalism of my youth.

On the docket for next month:

• New Mercies by Sandra Dallas
  For my in-real-life book club.
• The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan
  Because my sister-in-law (a different one than above) recommended it.
• Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
  For Carrie’s Chronicles of Narnia Reading Challenge.
• 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
  For the Reading to Know Classics Bookclub.

Don’t forget to drop by 5 Minutes 4 Books to see what others are reading this month!