Ninety percent of the books I read come from recommendations on blogs I follow. In the spirit of paying it forward, I thought I’d start sharing my reads as well in a monthly round-up. 

My goal for April was to read four books, though really what I wanted was to stop wasting all my nursing time refreshing Facebook over and over. Seven books later, I’m going to call the month a success. It’s unusual for me the last few years to have read so many fiction books. I think it’s the summer weather. Even if I can’t be at the beach, light reads are perfect this time of year.

Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby by Tracy Hogg. As with most parenting books, I took what I wanted and left what didn’t jive with my own parenting philosophies. Paige and I had started to develop a routine right at the time I read this book and Hogg’s sleep-eat-play philosophy helped me fine tune things for us. I found the advice around setting a routine more useful than the advice around sleep as it wasn’t split out by age and I didn’t feel comfortable with some of her suggestions for my two month old.

Good Night, Sleep Tight: The Sleep Lady’s Gentle Guide to Helping Your Child Go to Sleep, Stay Asleep, and Wake Up Happy by Kim West. This book (and advice from my SIL, Brittany) is the reason I’m awake to write this blog post. We went from bedtime taking nearly two hours and sleep stretches of only ninety minutes or two hours max to twenty minute bedtime and four to five hour stretches of blessed sleep. No tears have been shed, everyone is getting more sleep, and we all wake up smiling. I love that the book is broken out by age and that the techniques we’ve used to help Paige sleep better seem completely appropriate for her. I bought a copy of this book and plan to continue with the techniques as she grows.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Sometimes you just want a sweet young adult love story to get lost in for a bit and high school love, complete with cringe worthy moments, annoying parents, and popular kids is perfect for that. If I had to pick one beach read for this summer it would definitely be Eleanor & Park.

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe. This is a sweet tribute to the time the author spent reading with his mom after her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. I loved all the book suggestions, but really loved the story of a mother and son making the best of what time they have left with each other.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. By the time books show up in my library queue I’ve usually forgotten what they are about. This book, while a relatively easy fiction read, delves into some heavy topics without making them feel weighty. At the same time it’s a sweet love story and has you thinking about how we treat the disabled in our community. High recommend and would put it in my new made up category of “beach read with good social commentary”.

Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty. This is a great summer beach read. It’s my second Moriarty book and while I enjoyed What Alice Forgot more, this one is entertaining as well. Its the story of thirty something triplets and their age and current life status is something I could really identify with right now.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This book has been on my Goodreads ‘want to read’ list for years. It came up in The End of Your Life Book Club and I added it to my library holds and finally managed to read it. It won the Pulitzer Prize so it’s obviously a good book, but is it terrible if I admit I’m at a place where I’m enjoying beach reads a bit more?

I’m currently reading Beautiful Ruins and have a few more books by Liane Moriarty on deck for our vacation. I doubt I’ll read as much in June given that I want to spend some time ‘working’ around nutrition, but I still plan to spend my nursing time with my nose in a book instead of the internet. 

Ninety percent of the books I read come from recommendations on blogs I follow. In the spirit of paying it forward, I thought I’d start sharing my reads as well in a monthly round-up. 

I didn’t read a ton in March but towards the end of the month I realized that I have a lot of “free time” while nursing Paige that I was wasting by scrolling through Facebook thirty seven times each day. I added several books to my library queue and started using this time to get back into reading. As a bonus, I walk to the Green Lake Library to drop off and pick up books. Extra steps and free reading!

The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten. I believe I heard about this while reading Gail Simmons book as she worked for Steingarten back in the day. He is the food critic for Vogue magazine and the book is a collection of food related essays. I really enjoyed some of them but by the end I was reading just to finish the book. Also, it includes thoughts on nutrition from the late 90s (when it was published) that annoyed me to no end.

The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decisions for Your Child by Robert W. Sears. I almost didn’t include this on the list because the last thing I have any interest in doing is having a vaccine debate. I read this book because it explains the various diseases that we vaccinate against (I really had no idea what some of them were), how vaccines are manufactured, and how they work. If you’re curious about any of those topics it might be a good book for you to read. I’m sure there are plenty out there, this is just the one I selected.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. A fun fiction read about a man with Aspergers and his quest for love. I loved the character development and was so impressed that a former IT consultant wrote the novel. Maybe there’s hope for a second career in writing for me? I heard there is a sequel but I feel like there’s no way it could be as good and quirky, so I might just skip it. But I highly recommend this one.

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. My favorite book of the month. It was recommended to me last year by a friend from school (hi Nan!) and I should have jumped on it earlier. It happens to be in my favorite (made up) genre – books written about real life events that weave in other plot lines relevant to the time of the story (The Devil in the White City is my favorite example of this). The one also happens to take place locally for me, which is always fun to read. It’s the story of the UW crew team who won gold at the 1936 Berlin (Hitler’s) Olympics.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. I’ve seen Moriarty come up over and over in the blogosphere but had never read any of her books. Now I know what all the fuss is about, this book was really entertaining. It was a relatively quick, fiction read, but it was well written and kept my attention. I looked forward to nursing sessions so that I could jump back into the story. I’ve added several more of her books to my library queue. Quick synopsis: Alice suffers an accident and loses memory of the last decade of her life (during which she had three children and a decade’s worth of life experiences).

Next up is a collection of books on baby sleep. If we’ve talked in real life in the last few weeks I’m sure I’ve mentioned more than a few times that my kid has decided to stop sleeping at night. While all experts (my sister, the pediatrician, the lactation consultant, etc.) have told me it’s just a phase, I’m convinced that if I read enough books I’ll find the answer. Wish me luck!

Ninety percent of the books I read come from recommendations on blogs I regularly read. In the spirit of paying it forward, I thought I’d start sharing my reads as well in a monthly round-up. 

I wrote this post right before going to the hospital to have Paige. Since I wasn’t expecting to deliver then it never got posted. I doubt I’ll ever read this many books in a single month again, but maternity leave and a late arriving baby lead to an above average amount of reading time. February was all about the memoirs.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler. I liked but I didn’t love. I found it to be just a little on the boring side. To be fair, I have already read Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and Rachel Dratch’s memoirs. Being the fourth female comedian / television actress memoir on a list probably has more to do with why I thought it was boring than the book itself. I’d heard most of the stories already in the other books (college theater, spending your twenties dirt poor in Chicago, making it big in NYC around thirty, etc). I do appreciate that she didn’t exploit her divorce to sell books (though I’d totally be lying to say I was a little disappointed there weren’t more details). I really enjoyed the chapter on Parks & Rec. I’m not a big SNL watcher, but I did watch most of Parks & Rec and getting a behind the scenes view into the cast was entertaining.

The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them by Tim Howard. Here’s the thing: If you’re not into soccer, you’re probably not going to enjoy this. It’s written about as well as you’d expect a book written by an athlete with a helper author to be written. As a relative newcomer to world of soccer, I loved hearing his story as it paralleled the rise of soccer in the US. Tidbits from the past few World Cups and the USMNT in general were really interesting. Unlike a lot of memories, I found him to be endearingly honest. It may have not been the most well written book, but you could feel the love he felt for his mother, wife, and children come through in his story.

Hidden by Catherine McKenzie. Once a month I get an email from Amazon with four new books from which I can choose one or two to download for free on my Kindle (I think this is a Prime perk?). The books are never great and they are almost always fiction (not my favorite), but because they are on the Kindle app on my iPhone they are convenient. I wouldn’t really recommend this book unless you’re looking for a book about death and infidelity. I didn’t really find any of the characters redeeming enough to connect with, which always leaves a fiction book lacking in my opinion.

In the last month of pregnancy I spent most nights awake from 3am – 5am on the couch in our office. I sometimes succeeded at reading rather than mindlessly surfing the internet.

Talking With My Mouth Full by Gail Simmons. Greg and I are enjoying watching Top Chef from the first season (we have each only watched the Seattle season previously) and when I came across Gail Simmons’ memoir I immediately added it to my library queue. Loved the inside scoop on Top Chef as well as reading about how she has cultivated her career in a field that didn’t really exist until recently. It was a quick read and, unlike a lot of memoirs, because she is a journalist it was well written. There are some spoilers from the first few seasons, but we’re probably the only people currently watching a reality show that aired in 2008.

Dinner: A Love Story by Jenny Rosenstratch. From the author of the blog with the same name, this book is half memoir, half recipe book. Lately I’ve been listening to the America’s Test Kitchen podcast and I’m pretty sure that’s where I heard about it and how it ended up in my library queue. (Most books take some time from when I request them to when I get an email that they are waiting for me and by then I’ve usually forgotten about them.) It’s another quick read and focuses on her family’s decision to make family dinner a priority. Having eaten dinner as a family nearly every night while growing up, I related to Jenny’s drive to make this happen. I hope we can incorporate family dinner into our life as our kids grow. Obviously it won’t be every night with Greg’s current work situation, but we can make it a priority as often as possible. I’ve been known to tell him he can only count it as a non-travel night if we eat dinner together. I took pictures of a handful of the recipes and look forward to trying them when I am back in a regular cooking rhythm. (If you’re a pasta eater, you’d probably really enjoy most of the recipes in the book.)

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. I’ve saved this book on my Goodreads Want to Read list for years and finally got around to it. I was definitely missing out. It takes an amazing writer to eloquently and beautifully write about the year in her life after which she lost her husband and almost lost her only child. I love books that make me think and this one definitely made me consider my own views on grief – why we grieve, how we grieve, how grief is different by culture.

I also finally finished The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which I talked about in my pregnancy reads post.