What? You still read books? You haven’t posted a review in so long that we thought maybe it was because all you read are board books with Noah?

What are you talking about? I posted one just a few weeks ago!

Ok, true, but it was the first one in like a year.

I’m still reading. I’m just not keeping track of what I read like I did back in 2005, before I had a baby. Or writing about it. Also, I’m in this weird phase where I re-read the same books over and over. And not just to Noah.

Huh. You know that’s weird, right?

Shut up. It works for me, and besides, I’m trying to talk about a new book, ok?

As I was planning to say, before I got caught up in that imaginary conversation with you, I’ve just finished reading Marjorie Greenfield’s The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book. I read it as part of the MotherTalk book tour. (They gave me a free copy of the book, but I was not otherwise compensated for this review.)

When I signed up, I expected The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book to be pretty much like the myriad of other pregnancy books I obsessively bought when I was pregnant with Noah, only with some additional information on the Family & Medical Leave Act, and maybe some additional suggestions for staying healthy in different work environments, plus hopefully some advice on managing returning to work.

It isn’t.

The first three chapters are about your health before you even try to get pregnant. And the next two are about trying to get pregnant — and how/when to proceed “When Nature Isn’t Working.”

And while the next four sections are divided into the three trimesters and the actual birth, the week-by-week fetal development information ranges from a few paragraphs per week, down to a chart of key milestones.

Instead, the focus is on things like:

• How to Choose a Doctor or Midwife
• Communicating About Your Pregnancy at Work
• Second Trimester Prenatal Testing
• Arranging for Maternity Leave
• Your “Birth Plan”
• Natural Childbirth/Epidurals/Other Pain Relief Options
• Cesarean Sections

Personally, my biggest fear/annoyance about pregnancy books is that they will be ALL about the unacknowledged assumption that the reader is in a heterosexual marriage. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But not every pregnant person is either married or straight, and you would think that authors would remember that.

I liked how this book handled that.

Right up front in the Preface, on the first page of text in the book, Greenfield says:

I also want to explain what may seem like assumptions about gender and sexual orientation. In this book, I used the male gender for the partner, since that is the most common arrangement, and alternated male and female for the baby (by chapter). In places, I assumed that the mom was heterosexual and in a long-term relationship, but I tried to address other arrangements when it made a difference.

See how easy that is? Authors don’t need to engage in awkward writing OR to ignore the diverse circumstances under which women get pregnant. Speaking to your specific imaginary reader is totally fine — just acknowledge the fact that your actual readers will be in many different circumstances, and when that makes a difference, address it! Good job, Dr. Greenfield!

A few other things I liked about this book:

• There were lots of great quotations from moms, about their experiences, throughout the book. (Although some of the “anonymizing” was silly. Like “Jane S., state governor. Gee, I wonder who that is.)
• Non-judgmental tone in discussing emotionally charged issues like c-sections, circumcision, and breastfeeding/use of formula.
• Use of quotation marks around “Birth Plan” and explicit recognition that your birth is not going to go according to anyone’s plan. I really think that the moms who are the most attached to their idea of how birth “should go” are the ones who are the unhappiest with their actual experience. (That’s NOT what Greenfield said, but I felt validated in my opinion by her quotation marks. Certainly she agrees that you should talk with your health care providers about what you want.)
• The chapter “Crawling Up the Learning Curve” about the exhausting emotional roller coaster of the first few weeks home with a newborn does a good job of setting a new mom’s expectations. (But does anyone ever believe how crazy it will be?)
• The information about pumping at work, that pumping is a learned skill, and that your workplace may or may not do a good job of supporting your need to pump, are things I think very few women think about in advance — and it would be helpful to do so!
• Finding a health care practice — great information explaining the different types of options, including OBs, Family Doctors, Certified Nurse Midwives, and various other types of midwives, as well as RNs, Nurse Practicioners, Doulas, and Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialists. Also excellent information about how to figure out if the practice is the right fit for you. I had a hard time finding a practice to deliver Noah, and it would have been reassuring to have something concrete like the list of questions this book provides.
• Great appendices full of information about infertility treatment, interpreting various prenatal tests, and additional resources both online and in print.

This book would be most useful to someone who is at the very beginning of the process of trying to get pregnant.

While readers who are or have dealt with infertility treatment will quibble with some of the assumptions in the chapter “Trying to Get Pregnant,” for an average, fertile, healthy, heterosexual woman in a relationship, the information is WAY MORE useful than we got in high school sex ed, and probably works for most people.

The next group of people I think would find this book valuable are professional women in urban or suburban areas. We are the people most likely to be able to make the wide range of choices about health care, work for employers covered by the FMLA, and likely to buy multiple pregnancy books.

Yeah. Multiple pregnancy books.

Maybe I’m unique, but in both of my pregnancies, I’ve wanted more details about both fetal development and the changes happening to my pregnant body than this book includes. That’s ok, all those other books have that. And most of them don’t have the breadth of information in this book.

If you are pregnant for the first time, or hope to become pregnant for the first time in the next six months or a year, I recommend picking up these two books: The Working Woman’s Pregnancy Book and Bun in the Oven by Kaz Cooke.

And if that sounds like you (or you just want to read it), leave a comment. One random commenter will be the lucky winner of this book. (You can’t have my copy of Bun – I’m re-reading it for the week by week details!)

We’ve been super-busy and I am extra-tired lately, so here are some extremely short versions of the posts I have been writing in my head:

• Book Review of Big Green Purse:

This is a great resource on how women’s “power of the purse” can be used to help contribute to a healthier, more sustainable way of life. And in many cases, it actually saves money to do it that way! MacEachern very helpfully lists some top “bang for your buck” suggestions in each chapter of the book, so that if a reader wants to test a few simple changes, figuring out some options is easy.

We read this as part of the local Smith Club Book Club this month, and most of the other women at the meeting agreed. The top changes people are considering after reading are joining a CSA and switching cleaning products.

Full disclosure: I did score a review copy of this book, but this review was not otherwise compensated.

• Noah seems to have contracted Fifth Disease. It appears to be not serious, at least for him. I’m hoping that my utter lack of symptoms means that I, like most adults, had it as a child and am now immune. Because naturally it is dangerous only to people with compromised immune system and fetuses. And for some reason, my midwives haven’t returned my phone call about it.
• No bug sightings since Saturday!
• I am officially out of 90% of non-maternity clothes. I freaked out last week because I hadn’t gained any weight in 2 weeks, and I’m in prime weight-gain time for pregnancy, the second trimester. But don’t worry, I made up for it and am up 2 lbs since my freakout last Tuesday. Happily, I am still not on track to match last pregnancy’s 50 lb weight gain.
• I joined a food swap. About a dozen other toddler moms and I are each making a bunch of sets of felt food items, and then doing a massive exchange, so our kids get a variety of safe pretend food. I’m making fried eggs — I did the first one last night, while watching election returns, and it turned out adorable!Considering that his cooking toys currently rank 3rd behind trains and cars, I think Noah will like the bounty due to arrive in early June.
• I’ve been falling off the fruit & veg/healthy eating wagon lately. So I’m re-instating my daily fruit & veg reports here. Fruit & Veg Count, 4/22: Big fat nada, unless you count the amount of strawberries in a cup of strawberry yogurt. I’m going to go eat a banana.

Jenny tagged me for this book meme ages ago, and I finally have the teeny bit of leftover brainpower to do it.

Here are the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the first 5 sentences and write them down.
4. Then invite 5 friends to do the same.

The book I’m midway through reading is Embryo Culture: Making Babies in the Twenty-First Century, by Beth Kohl. I read about this book over at my location-doppelganger Mel’s a week or two ago, when it was being reviewed by the Barren Bitches Book Brigade. Here’s an interview with fellow Badger Beth, and links to lots of other reviews.

I’m not done with the book yet, but so far, I think it’s a fantastic read, deftly bridging the gap between personal memoir about the experience of infertility and both failed and successful IVF, and well-researched cultural critique.

Here’s the meme quotation from Embryo Culture:

Weekend well spent, we’ll drive home, and for the next ten days I’ll go about my business knowing intuitively that I am with child. Examining packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, ordering books of stamps, I’ll be focused inward, even as my glow emanates out to the world. On the eleventh day I’ll administer a home pregnancy test. The result window will immediately turn hot, hot pink, setting all sorts of records for the quickest and most undeniably positive result, which of course I won’t realize, knowing only that it works just like they say it will on TV.

I’ll bake chocolate souffles and nestle the test stick inside Gary’s serving, spooning extra whipped cream on top.

I’m going to tag Mel (do you play internet memes, Mel?), Cindy, Clare, Lesbian Dad, and because talking to them unexpectedly was the absolute high point of my week, Levi’s Moms. (Either or both, but I imagine Mama Mindy is more likely to play. Especially if she’s not done writing whatever it was she was not writing when she called.)

Anyone who would rather not play on her own blog is welcome to play in the comments here, and anyone I didn’t tag who thinks it sounds like fun, please pretend I tagged you.

I just finished reading Alternadad by Neal Pollack, and I loved it. It’s my second favorite book about being a parent, after Operating Instructions, by Anne Lamott.

I also have to give credit for my having read this to Shelfari. It caught my eye on Lizzie’s shelf, which contained numerous books I’ve read and loved, so while I was stuck in La Jolla, I found and bought it.

I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it weren’t for Lizzie’s recommendation. It’s a dad book, for one thing, and the cover features a rubber ducky with a stainless steel bill ring. In my mind, I am just not as hip and cool as that kind of parent — and let’s be honest, my favorite “music” is NPR. Aside from that, I 90% don’t care about what I’m listening to, although I sometimes pretend otherwise.

But it seems that being “alternative” is more complicated than just partying and being ironic and listening to bands in smokey bars. If Pollack and his family are examples, it also includes being politically active in your community, trying to be an informed consumer and to struggle with the compromises that requires, and smoking a lot of marijuana.

I’m not a pot smoker any more than I’m a watch bands in smokey bars person, but I am progressive, moderately active, and I struggle with making consumer choices that are right for my family and what we believe. I’m also good with being ironic. Oh yeah, and I think I automatically get a heaping pile of alternative cred points for being a 2 mom family. Even if I do look like Jenny of Suburbia.

Here’s what I loved about Alternadad.

Pollack wrote about his family, from meeting his wife, through their decision to move to LA when their son was about 2 years old. I cracked up reading at various moments, including:

Few couples have ever gone into childbirth as educated as Regina and I. We new every possible permutation and were prepared for all of the curves. This just might be the easiest birth in the history of humankind.

I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but if you think an ironic outcome is on it’s way, you are absolutely correct. But don’t worry, everyone is ok in the end.
Another favorite example:

I realized that marriage would mean some concessions. But I didn’t realize I was marrying an adult female Pigpen, a woman who seemed to have a genetic penchant towards sloppy surroundings.

…

I began to realize that Regina employed an odd household logic. It had only a little bit to do with her not wanting to do chores, because I was more than willing to split the work with her. Slowly, it occurred to me that, for psychological reasons, she really didn’t want things to be clean, that she preferred for things to skirt the near edge of vile before she went on a massive bleach rampage.

Like Operating Instructions, Pollack wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly. He didn’t whitewash to make himself look good, or his son, or his parents. I don’t think he whitewashed to make his wife look better, but she comes across as the person I’d most want to hang out with in the book, so maybe I’m wrong there. (I wrote that last sentence before deciding to include those quotations, so now I’m thinking he didn’t whitewash her either. Nope.)

In every major decision, every struggle, every argument, you can understand and relate to the difficulty and the final choices. They’re human choices, full of human love and human pain.When people write about their experiences in a way that is true and touches on the universality of being a parent, being married, or trying to pursue their professional & artistic dreams, it doesn’t matter if they are Jenny of Suburbia, the poster boy for hipster fatherhood, or a depressed recovering alcoholic single mother. Almost anyone can still hear himself or herself in their stories.

Pollack is that kind of writer. And if you are a liberal or progressive parent, trying to figure out how to entertain and teach your child without sacrificing your values or giving everything over to the easiest answer, I think you’ll love this book.

Also? Pollack writes a bunch of blogs, so you can decide for yourself whether or not you like his writing style before you buy the hardcover book.

(Aside to Parents.com: You have some great bloggers! But would you mind making it easier to find them and making your links shorter and easier to follow? This is a terrible URL: http://community.parents.com/dgroups/persona.jsp?plckPersonaPage=PersonaBlog&
plckUserId=a628e41865b5c3c340ae2e98f70ccc4f&userId=a628e41865b5c3c340ae2e98f70ccc4f&
ordersrc=rdparents0072& , why not make them something like http://blogs.parents.com/alternadad or www.parents.com/blogs/twomothers, which I could remember instead of needing to bookmark or google every time. Even if you do have to query a database for each entry, you could return it to that kind of top level URL structure.)

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of Oct 4). Thanks Reno!
Bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list. ? for can’t remember if I ever tried to read it or not.

Having stolen this list from a Reedie, I’m also going to add in the annotations R, S, and HS if I read the book in question at Reed or Smith, or in high school.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina R
Crime and Punishment R
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude HS
Wuthering Heights* HS
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
The Odyssey R
Pride and Prejudice* HS
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov R
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife*
The Iliad R
Emma*
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway S
Great Expectations
American Gods
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha*
Middlesex*
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales HS & S — read and enjoyed selected stories, never tried to do the entire thing from soup to nuts
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera HS
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984 HS
Angels & Demons
The Inferno R
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse S
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune - I’ve been thinking about rereading this
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon****** – one of my favorite books ever
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved S
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter HS
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion?
Lolita
Persuasion*
Northanger Abbey* HS
The Catcher in the Rye - 8th grade
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid - R
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

A lot of you know that I’m a wannabee librarian, I love libraries (although I hate giving books back), and I generally think that librarians rock.

So of course I “celebrate” Banned Books Week. Celebrate is such a strange word, isn’t it? But I think that recognizing the ongoing challenges to young people’s freedom to read and learn to think for themselves is important. It’s one of the many valuable services that librarians and libraries provide to our communities.

These were the 10 books most frequently challenged in 2006: (I bold italicized the ones I’ve read.)

1. “And Tango Makes Three” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, for homosexuality, anti-family, and unsuited to age group;
2. “Gossip Girls” series by Cecily Von Ziegesar for homosexuality, sexual content, drugs, unsuited to age group, and offensive language;
3. “Alice” series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor for sexual content and offensive language;
4. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things” by Carolyn Mackler for sexual content, anti-family, offensive language, and unsuited to age group;
5. “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison for sexual content, offensive language, and unsuited to age group;
6. “Scary Stories” series by Alvin Schwartz for occult/Satanism, unsuited to age group, violence, and insensitivity;
7. “Athletic Shorts” by Chris Crutcher for homosexuality and offensive language;
8. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky for homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language, and unsuited to age group;
9. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison for offensive language, sexual content, and unsuited to age group; and
10. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content, offensive language, and violence.

And these are the 10 most frequently challenged authors, from 1990 - 2004.

1. Alvin Schwartz
2. Judy Blume
3. Robert Cormier
4. J.K. Rowling
5. Michael Willhoite
6. Katherine Paterson
7. Stephen King
8. Maya Angelou
9. R.L. Stine
10. John Steinbeck

Here’s the thing: I respect the right of a parent to decide what is appropriate, or not, for their own children to read and view. Trying to limit that hugely seems like a waste of effort to me, and a good way to get your kids to sneak around, but that’s each of our individual business/problem as parents. And frankly, if your repressive parenting makes your kid sneak away to the library…that’s actually a pretty good silver lining.

But that’s not what challenges to books are about. These are parents (mostly) who want to prevent EVERYONE from reading the books they don’t want their children to read.

And that is unacceptable.

You may not want your child to learn about loss or death from a book like Bridge to Terabithia, or the Harry Potter series, and I respect your right to make that choice. But I don’t agree with it.

I think fiction is a wonderfully safe learning tool, allowing all of us as human beings to imagine things we’ve never experienced, including some things we hope never to experience.

Reasonable minds may differ as to when a child is mature enough to read this or that. In the context of Banned Books Week, that’s one of the many valuable roles a librarian can play. Without preventing a young person from reading something they want to read, a librarian can help them select appropriate material.

I’m not going to go into my personal opinions about these books and authors, except to say that some I love, some I am just not a fan of, and some don’t interest me.

That, I think, is precisely the point.

If you don’t want to read something, there’s a very simple way to do it. Close the book and walk away from it. If you want to have the huge fight with your child about not reading something, go right ahead. But leave my child out of it.

A tip of the pixel to Clare and Polly, for reminding me to blog about this.

Yes, at last long last, it’s a book review post, of Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. I’m not sure there have been any since Noah was born. Not that I haven’t been reading, I just haven’t been writing about what I’ve been reading.

My first thought, when the opportunity to do this review for Mother Talk came up, was a mix of interest and skepticism. I can be a book snob, and James Patterson hasn’t been an author on my list. Plus, the book is Part 3 of a series that I haven’t read. Isn’t that just wrong? On the other hand, a free YA sci-fi book with a fabulous-sounding heroine? Well, that is my cuppa tea.

First the full disclosure part: Mother-Talk gave me the book, and they’re giving me a $20 Amazon gift certificate for doing this review. I think you know that my opinion can’t be bought, but especially not that cheap.

Now the meat: I really enjoyed this book! I was pleasantly surprised by how much.

The writing has a nice witty edge to it, making fun of readers like me at the beginning of Chapter 2, when the narrator Max comments:

Those of you who picked up this book cold, even though it’s clearly part three of a series, well get with the program, people! I can’t take two days to get you all caught up on everything!

Heh. The rest of the (short) chapter introduces all of the main characters whom I would have known had I read the first two books, and points the reader in the direction of character Fang’s blog. (Other characters have started posting too, but in this book, Fang is the only one.) Kinda gimmicky, but it drew me into the story and left me thinking about reading the first two books.

The basic plotline goes like this: 6 science experiment kids, who were genetically engineered to have wings, and their talking dog, have escaped from their evil corporate creators.

Of course the evil scientists are hunting for them, and they also have a dastardly plot to reduce the population of Earth by some ridiculous amount like 50% — I’ve spent 5 precious minutes of Noah’s nap looking it up unsuccessfully — and Max is determined to stop them.

How can 6 bird-kids and a talking dog do that? The old fashioned way: grassroots organizing!

YES, you heard me right, these sci-fi action heroes use their blog to communicate with kids and sympathetic adults all over the world, and convince the kids especially to take action locally to stop this evil multinational corporate and corrupt government plot.

In fact, I hope that the legions of teen fans not only enjoy the action-adventure and the budding romance elements of Maximum Ride 3 — I hope they imagine themselves making the kind of difference that ordinary kids all over the world make in the book.

Our bird-kid protagonists may not be average kids, but they know that they can’t save the world all by themselves. Instead of either giving up, or asking someone else to do it, they organize and inspire others to join the fight.

It isn’t just in books that ordinary people blogging can make a huge difference with a global impact — look at the amazing success two Moms, Cooper & Emily, had with the Been There Clearinghouse, which connected people in need with people who wanted help, after Hurricane Katrina. Or Melissa Poe, who started Kids FACE (For A Cleaner Environment) at age 9, and has seen it grow to a organization with more than 300,000 members in 15 countries — who have planted more than a million trees.

So yeah, I liked the book. I liked the message as well as the curl up and get lost in the adventure. But you should probably start with book one, Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment.