My 2016 in books

It's been so quiet on here recently. So much stuff takes a while to process, and I think Great Thoughts but then don't get the space to articulate them while they're fresh. Honestly, I might regain the habit in 2017, but something I did manage this year was to log everything I read on Goodreads. I'd rather have written a proper blog post about each, but that seemed a sheer steep challenge, whereas two lines on Goodreads was manageable. Something that's interesting to me is how some books can make a massive impression while you're still in them, but fade away quickly like a cheap takeaway, and some burn more slowly. This doesn't really get captured if you're logging and writing about books as you read them (but I wanted to do this for the sake of keeping my stats up) so I felt sure I'd enjoy looking over my list for the year to see what stood out.  

January 2016 - 7 books
 January usually starts with some impulse reads, picked up for peanuts in the kindle sale, and there were some turkeys in here. I didn't enjoy the Danny Baker autobiography anywhere near as much as I'd hoped I would, and War Horse was a proper letdown - yes, I know it's a children's book, but I really don't think that's an excuse. But it was my time for falling in love with a new author, too - Sarah Moss captured my soul and heart with Night Waking which I think I might reread once a year while my children are still even slightly small, and then Bodies of Light which is a sort of follow up, or maybe you'd call it a companion, was just as wonderful.  

February 2016 - 6 books
A funny one - I seemed to rate most things at four stars and I feel odd about the only one I truly loved - The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It helped me to crystallise a resolution not to read anyone else's Goodreads reviews before I wrote my own, because I want to be honest and also not to be influenced by others' strong feelings. So many people railed against this one but I can't help it, I loved it (though I remember so little about it already, beyond how much I liked it). I was fascinated by Do no Harm, the memoir by a neurosurgeon, though I'd not read it again.

 March 2016 - only one book??
 Struggling to know what happened here. The only thing on my list is Lean In which is an exceedingly readable long essay, really, on what you might call "corporate feminism" - it gave me vague echoes of how past-Helen might have bought into all this stuff, before past-Helen went off and had babies and changed her views somewhat. Ah! Realised this was also the month I read The Forgotten and the Fantastical 2 which I couldn't find on Goodreads but actually did manage to blog about here.

 April 2016 - 6 books
  All becomes clear! There were some short reads in here, including several of the Little House on the Prairie series, and gosh, a small book of poems, Newborn by Kate Clanchy which I guzzled down in one sitting, sobbing, and then again the next day, sobbing again. It's just exquisite, start to finish. But - the big point is that I finished Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety: what a read, it took me so long, and pretty much stopped me reading anything else in March. I still don't know what to say about it - I remember it as a slog, and worth it, but still disappointing to me because it wasn't Wolf Hall, and in fact for me has been the least engaging of her books. I'm glad I read it, but it was a big time-spend.  

May 2016 - 2 books
Again this is a mystery to me. I was thrilled to discover Elizabeth Taylor - it was Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont that I happened to pick up, because it happened to be in the kindle sale, but I'm looking out for more. It was small in scope, and subtle in action, and entirely delicious. I enjoyed Our Endless Numbered Days too, though one part of the plot irritated me, and was slightly taken aback to see the author had read (and liked) my Goodreads review.  

June 2016 - what happened?
Goodreads says I didn't read anything. I think this was partly my new job, and partly a logging failure. Looks like I caught up the next month.  

July 2016 - 9 books
I read the rest of the Little House series, some in June, I think, and some more gorgeous perfect Sarah Moss, this time Signs for Lost Children. I was properly intrigued by Kirsty Logan's The Gracekeeper though seemingly not enough to give it five stars.  

August 2016 - 2 books

Again I dimly recall something was slowing me down here, because the two I read were both quite enjoyable - The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Sweet Home but both properly slight, in the way modern fiction is. It's becoming a noticeable pattern for me that if I'm reading something on my kindle that I'm not enjoying, it stops me reading at all, because I feel I'm not "allowed" to start anything else. This puts me in a cross mood and generally flattens everything for me, and I'm still not sensible enough to notice when it's happening and get a grip (by, for instance, closing the book).  

September 2016 - half-hearted Bookering

 I read Eileen and His Bloody Project which were both sort of fine, but uninspiring, and I've forgotten most of already. Then I got significantly stuck in the next one.

 October 2016 - NOTHING  

November 2016 - 6 books
 In a perfect illustration of my observation above, I got completely jammed in The Sellout. For about the first quarter I thought I was beholding genius. Really, I was spellbound, but reader, the spell wore off. This let me get myself in such a state that I abandoned the Booker shortlist project only half way through. Highlights after this, though, were the lovely Hollie McNish poetry and prose collection Nobody told me and then Olive Kitteridge which was just burstingly sad in an autumnal sort of way, like the Elizabeth Taylor it is just exquisitely drawn on a small canvas, and has put Elizabeth Strout very high on my list to read more of as soon as I can.

 December 2016 - a rush to the end with 7 books, and the month not even over yet
Some dross in here, but I think All the Light We Cannot See will stick with me for a long time. I was a bit let down by dear Sarah Moss with Cold Earth, which didn't quite live up to my hopes, but then, it was her first novel, and the mood it created was powerful, and besides I love her and will hear nothing bad said of her. Also at my great age I have finally read The Dark is Rising and it was just as excellent as I'd been led to believe it would be.

 What's next?
So much to read in 2017. I've a stack of more and less accessible books on feminism which are calling out loudly to me, and some things lined up on the Kindle, and am hoping to pick up a big batch of 99p bargains, though the sale so far this Christmas has been rubbish. I do love my modern fiction, and this will help if I up my target from 2016's 48 books (which I just about managed) to a neat 52. But I don't want to resist the longer reads, and rereading A Christmas Carol the other day, as I do every year, has made me want to go back to Dickens. So we'll see. I need to be bolder about stopping books if I'm just not enjoying them, and I need to keep focussed on picking up my kindle rather than wasting my brain browsing the internet on my phone. But mainly I just want to keep reading, and keep noting what I've read, and keep talking about books to anyone who will listen. It's been a long post, and I can't promise I won't do another one about everything else in 2016. Somehow the books bit is the easiest to pin down.

The Forgotten and the Fantastical 2 - a storming follow up

I've been hopeless recently about writing about books on here, because I was feeling too much pressure to write lots, so things were backing up. So instead I'm religiously logging each one on Goodreads (actually am a tiny bit behind there too) but wanted chance for a longer rave about this one. You know I'm involved with Mother's Milk Books, insofar as I help out behind the scenes a little when I can, and Teika is a dear friend, but it doesn't change what I think about the books (and I'd certainly not rave about something I didn't find rave-worthy)

The second volume of "The Forgotten and The Fantastical", published earlier this month, opens with a gloriously strong first three stories.

Rebecca Ann Smith's Rumpelstiltskin is such a creative take on the story, with an inspiring writing of the process of drawing a creative output from deep inside the self, at a horrible cost. The way she deals with the promising of the firstborn to Rumpelstiltskin, and its aftermath, has made me cry on each of several rereads. Then the wonderful Hansel's Trouble from Lindsey Watkins - I loved her story in last year's anthology, but loved this one even more. It puts the children's story into a real context, and speaks of the truth for those who suffer young: there is nothing as simple as an escape to ever-after happiness.

Last in these first three is Ana Salote's Grimm Reality, a more whimsical story but no less absorbing for that. Again, I'm a raving fan of Ana's writing, and this shows again her ability to capture magic even in the unpromising setting of Elephant and Castle.

I wanted to talk about these first three pieces in particular because they're such a strong start, and this matters to me in an anthology. I think Teika applied real editorial skill in how she has ordered the pieces, so there's a balance, and some shifting of mood. It also gave the chance for a gap before the other Rumpelstiltskin story, which I also found entrancing. Perhaps I'm biassed towards stories that capture the feeling between a mother and her baby; perhaps I like to tease myself with trauma. But this second Rumpelstiltskin, called Trash into cash (Becky Tipper) was modern, original, and deeply felt.

The other piece I want to mention by name was Nathan Ramsden's Icarus. I'd looked forward to it because his two stories in the last anthology were so original, and elegantly written. This one was, too - to my mind he's one of those writers who will have people saying one day "I knew him when he was starting out". There's just something about the confidence of tone, and the complete mastery of the whole story, that makes a reader feel in safe hands, willing to go wherever they are taken. 

Those were my top five, as it were, but there were thirteen other pieces too, all very readable, and with many other high points. As with any anthology, a few appealed to me less, and one or two were less skilled in execution, but much of this is personal taste. It's a meatier book than last year's, and an even higher standard in general. It's also given me some writing ideas: there were a few pieces in there I wished I'd written.

And, as ever, a beautiful book to look at and hold - Emma Howitt's pictures at the start of each story add atmosphere perfectly, without shouting for attention, but repaying it when they get it. I'm looking forward to filling my shelf with a row of these from year after year...

Feminism, the workplace, and failed audacity

There's a lot in the news at the moment about women's equality, workplace rights, and so on. The dominant push seems to be for quotas and strictly defined equality, so either parent can take parental leave, meaning neither sex is disadvantaged by time away from the workplace, and all of this kind of thing.
I've been reading this thinking well, they're missing the point. "They" are moving counters around a board, allocating open and closed boxes, and not understanding the early days of mother-baby bonding; perhaps more importantly, though, they are seeking freedom within SUCH a tight and unimaginative set of assumptions.
Yes, if we really honestly believe that the best work is always done in offices between exactly 9 and 5 on a Monday to Friday and that permanent employment contracts are always needed and that every job change should be career-enhancing and give a pay rise and that every business's person-hour needs are an exact multiple of 37.5, then the answer to the problem might be just to treat all employees as sexless, to let each individual take leave on the arrival of a new baby, to put in regulations about discrimination and equal pay and generally to ensure that We Are All Treated Exactly The Same which is to put it another way that We Are All Treated Exactly As Men In The Workplace Always Have Been.

Here, I don't want to explore the issues of why being a mother might not be like being a father, and nor do I want to empty out my heart on my own urgent connection to my sons that makes the full time model impossible for me.

Instead, I want to observe the structural problem. I want to howl, why aren't you looking at other options? Employers, or those who need stuff doing for them and are willing to pay for it, why are you so fearful of stepping away from that path? Instead of recruiting the right number of people for your average busy-ness, so that they're bored for part of the year and stressed beyond measure for another part, why not have a core of full-timers (and many want it. I'm not denying that) and supplement with freelancers, part timers, short term contracts? Why would you choose to limit your options, or do you truly believe that everyone available for full time work has inherently more talents than anyone offering something else?

This, to my mind, is as big a problem for women as whether maternity and paternity leave are well shared. While "we" are stuck in a mindset where there is A Single True Path, and where everyone needs to be physically present at the 10am team meeting on a Tuesday, because This Is What We Do, then we're not letting ourselves access any value from those who, for whatever reason, can't or won't offer that. Women do have babies - we really can't get past that - and while of course lots of these women do, by choice or necessity, get themselves straight back into full time paid work out of the home, we don't all want or feel able to do that. Years of training, and thousands of pounds of investment in human capital, are set aside because so many women experience a sudden shift to offering something a different shape from the crude hole that so many businesses are holding open.

There are gleams of hope, and small setups trying to bring together those wanting flexible work with those offering it, but many of these opportunities are laughable - "part time" roles asking for "only" 34 hours per week, or those described in the top line as "home based" but disclosing in the body of the ad that "occasional home working may be negotiated after a probationary period". It doesn't cut it, though. A good flexible freelancer is an amazing asset to have in your contact book - she might not be visible at a desk, and she might do things at peculiar times of day, but she also might have a pile of skills that you'd pay a fortune for in a full time employee (and not need most of the time), and she might turn things round overnight or at weekends, and she might even reward you with immense loyalty because you've taken a risk.

We do need a societal change in this respect - a move from "how do we enable women to get back to work as soon as possible?" to "how do we match work requirements with those who are best able to meet those requirements, surrendering, as we do so, our artificial and mainly imaginary constraints?".

What about the failed audacity? A personal end to this rant. I thought I could do something audacious. I could show how this can work, holding down a part time job and freelance work, being always with my babies while keeping a sharp brain, meeting other conventional employees as equals, being just as relevant and useful as anyone at a desk all week. And I was doing it, I really was, but I fear now that it's turning out to be in the same sense as an amateur juggler is "doing it" in between the point where he chucks twelve balls in the air and the point when they all tumble down onto his head. It seems I couldn't, quite, and I don't know where things go from here. I can do my best to "be the change I wish to see in the world", but gosh, out on the plains it's cold and draughty.


Note: yes, men. I'm writing about women, and the she-freelancer, because it's what I am. But men too! I believe my point about how unncecessarily limiting these self-imposed limits about timing and location of work really are applies to everyone. It's just that women, particularly in the childbearing years (and I do not love that phrase), might be bringing more of their own limits with them too.

Another note: yes, modern times, first world problem. I'm aware I could be out hoeing fields 14 hours a day, and taking in mending at night, and still ending up in the workhouse. But it matters because in the world I used to fit into, a professional world, there is a constant stream of discussion asking where all the senior women are, why women don't "succeed" (fsvo success) and so on

A final note: I have a million posts stored up, on a million topics. Hang on in there if you prefer it when I write about books or making stuff or my entirely wonderful children.

Oy Yew, and what makes good children's fiction brilliant

I've been wanting to write about Ana Salote's Oy Yew for a long time, since I first saw it, and wanting to say something more interesting than "it's wonderful", particularly because so many of my book posts at the moment seem to be raving about the great books, and it could sound as though I read uncritically. (I don't. I just have something of a squeeze on my time at the moment, and while I do seem to find a good amount of time to read, only books that have made a great impression have even a fighting chance of getting blogged about at the moment. Actually I have a post brewing about the male gaze, and the insidious way it penetrates so much fiction, but that's not for here and now).

So. I'm not one of those adults who enjoys being infantile, saying that Horrid Histories are just their level and they would happily always choose children's books over adults'. A properly written, challenging, adult read is supreme: I'd choose Hilary Mantel, or Marilynne Robinson, or Dickens, or several others over almost anyone else. But there's a corner of my heart fenced off for a certain type of children's fiction.

Children's fiction that works doesn't fob us off with overly simple language or improbable happenings. It doesn't show us characters who are reductively single-faceted and expect us to identify goodies and baddies on page one. What it does is set up a world that has fewer boundaries, where imagination is allowed to go wilder than most adult-oriented authors permit themselves, and where the characters have weaknesses and nuances and are often battling a strange and confusing universe. Of course this is one of the features that lets children identify with good books written for them: so much of our world is geared at adults, and uses strange language and difficult ideas and refuses to explain things properly to them.

The characteristic that really leaped out for me, though, when I was trying to analyse this, was that (good) authors writing for children aren't afraid to tell us what their characters are thinking and feeling. We don't have to be stuck in the first person for this, but we're not given the cold detached third person that adult fiction often uses, where the main characters' motivations are opaque, and we're meant to be able to deduce them with some kind of behaviourist approach.

In His Dark Materials, perhaps the best trilogy I've ever read, we know what Lyra thinks because Pullman lets us into her head - we can also see from other factors what the limits of her understanding are, and we see more than her, so we understand more, but it's not patronising to her or to the reader, it's just acknowledging the childish viewpoint at the same time as the spectator's position. With Pantalaimon we know less, he's an animal and we read him by what he does, though of course in "that scene" on the banks of the river, anyone who's not sobbing and scrabbling with him must be made of iron. And then Will, oh, Will, and his desperate protection of his mother, and his internal battles, and his need to continue holding it together, to banish hard thoughts from his mind, well, I can't think of a better description of someone learning to master themselves. I won't even write about Hester and Lee Scoresby, because I'm tired and fragile and it might break me.

Diana Wynne Jones is the other children's author who springs to mind - her universes are wildly inventive, but mainly her people are real, real, real. The sibling rivalry in Charmed Life is very believable, and again she has no fear of letting us see inside characters' heads, even when they're not being entirely sympathetic.

This might not seem relevant to Oy Yew, but it is. It's nominally a children's book, but I've rarely seen such a complex and endearing character as Oy. He jumps out straight away and although we learn more about him through the book, it all chimes perfectly - I felt the way you do when you meet someone you can tell you'll be friends with, and whenever you find out something more about them you think well, yes, of course, in some sense I knew that already. He's got special senses and unusual skills, but mainly it's his sensibility, his sensitivity, his fragility that's a strength. It's not surprising that he grows in confidence and bravery as the book goes on, because it's how he obviously would develop, and all of his encounters make sense. The other waifs all play second fiddle to him, but that's as it should be; that's not to say they're not well-drawn, because they are, but they're in the background in this telling, even though he's the insubstantial one, or as the first line says, "slight, weakly, overlooked".
There's a whole world here, not with magic but just with different senses, and different laws, and different social expectations, and natural forces that may have a will - like our world but with a strange, fairy-like take on it. This is the sort of inventiveness I admire so very very much - keeping to the basic physical laws of the world as we know it but bending and distorting everything, inventing new hobbies (competitive bone-collecting!) and a new set of race relations. It's carried lightly - there's no sense of "look at all this cool stuff I've made up" - with just the right amount of scene-setting. This may partly be a consequence of the pitch to children - an author writing for adults might feel the need to add more ballast, more Serious Explanation and Detailed Exposition, but honestly, the courage to let the characters and the world speak for themselves, and the plot to move on at its own speed, not held back by good manners or literary pretension - well, I could think of many who could take a lesson from this.
It's funny, too - I love the rhyming cook, and the strange afflictions, and the grotesque character of Jeopardine.
And thrilling! The end took my breath away when I first read it, and I had that proper sensation of mourning, and of desperation to know what happened next (it's the start of a trilogy).

Truly, I'd recommend this just as a novel to read, with absolutely no sense of shame in buying it as an adult. The things that make it a children's book are all the things that are most admirable about the best children's books, and all that means is that if you have the right kind of age children they'll love it too. But I'll be rushing out to buy parts two and three in just the same way as I'd hurtle to the shops if Pullman added number 4 onto his trilogy - it's in that kind of league for me.

(you can buy it from Mother's Milk Books - and also can read the first chapter online - and yes, I am associated with them, but not financially, and I bought my own copy, and am also entirely incapable of raving about books I don't love - you can check that by seeing what I said about Breast Intentions even though I'd had a review copy...)

The forgotten and the fantastical

There's all sorts I need to write about at the moment, and a million books I've loved and want to rave about, so much I've been overwhelmed and paralysed into not-starting. Plus, and I know this sounds like an excuse, but don't even dare to dismiss it as one unless you too have more than one pre-school-age child and an evening job, I really am finding time hard to manage. It's not just about deciding to work harder or stretch myself thinner: there really are only a few hours in the day when I can be at a computer, hard in the day with the children, then in the evenings I absolutely must earn a living, and when I've done the money-bit and turned to my own projects the boys get into the phase of evening when they just take it in turns to wake, and won't settle without me. I'm trying to think of innovative ways to eke out more time, and drawing a blank. Setting the alarm "an hour earlier" as is so commonly recommended doesn't work amazingly well if your children's start time varies so massively - today we've all been awake since 5.30 and I'm not sure I'm committed enough to my art that I'd have been able to leap up at 4.30. Plus, I feel fairly sure that my getting up early would just wake them, and it's hard enough as it is, getting to that time of morning when you've done all the activities and good mothering and stuff, and it's still only 9am....

ANYWAY
I loved The Forgotten and the Fantastical because it did that thing to me that some books do - it made me want to join in. It made me think about fairy tales, and which ones I'd like to tell again in my own way, and what messages they're giving us. I blogged a little about it a while back, about the hidden values and their dangers, but that didn't really say much about the book.
There are 11 stories, varying from fairly straight re-tellings through creative re-imaginings and brand new stories. It's hard to pick out which ones were particularly special, but I did think the opening and closing pieces, from N J Ramsden,. were properly disturbing, in a good way. The boy and the bird was just magical and lyrical and troubling and I had to read it twice before I could carry on.
Then there was the glorious Red Riding Hood retelling, Footfalls of the hunter, visceral and urgent and a proper making the story her own. Gepetto's child has a Blade runner kind of feel, but it's more original than that makes it sound. And I was deeply impressed by the versatility of the two Marija Smits stories - assuming a range of narrative voices is something I'd love to be able to do with any kind of skill, and she does just this, with Screaming Sue having a Holden Caulfield sort of tone.
I'm not trying to belittle these stories at all by comparing and referencing to other things, in fact quite the opposite. Really worthwhile reading for me gains its value through creating resonances, echoes of what I've read or seen or thought about before and noises that keep chiming through my head making me want to try my own reflections. So when writing puts me in mind of something else, then something else again, it's properly paying for itself, giving me lots of fuel for my money.

And on what might seem like a slightly shallow note, it's a physically beautiful book - a lovely size to hold, and eyecatching cover, and quirky little pictures at the start of each story. It doesn't matter as much as the words inside, but it helps to make it feel special, and this matters to me when more and more of the books I buy these days are for my kindle - I like a book that I can enjoy physically as well as intellectually and emotionally, if that doesn't sound too pompous. It's a feature of everything that Mother's Milk Books sells - a physical loveliness that pulls you in before you even begin reading.

Not such a blog silence until next time, I swear. I want to write about the stresses and strains of work, about trying to balance the callings to do so many things, the rough rough challenges of a sensitive yet boisterous four year old displaced by his brother, the glorious smell and feel of a plump baby, the fun and games of learning to use a sewing machine, oh, all sorts, there's so much in there waiting for a chance to tumble out....maybe some speech recognition software and a bit of benign neglect are called for.

Why Doulas Matter

It's taken me a while to get round to writing this: often I write about books from my memory of them, relying on my impressions, which is quicker. I have huge time and respect for proper book bloggers who have lots of quotes and obvious results of careful notes, but it's not how I usually approach things. This one, though, I wanted to pin down why I loved it so much, because it's the kind of book that could seem slight and unnecessary, and wouldn't be well served by a write-up that just says it's amazing.

But, it's amazing.

Maddie McMahon is a practising doula, and has written this beautiful pocket-sized book to explain what a doula does, perhaps mainly for mothers considering using one, but also for anyone who thinks they might want to be one (and, maybe, for health professionals, to understand who the strange lady in the corner is). It's so far, though, from being a checklist or a textbook.

Really, it's suffused with love, her love for her clients, the presence of oxytocin and incredibly strong emotions in the birthing room, the sense of the relationship between a mother and her new baby. With such a strong current like this running through it, maybe the actual words would hardly matter, but they're lyrical and powerful, elegantly written, with a lightness of touch but at the same time a perfect understanding of the grave solemnity of the act of birthing.

I loved the assurance to mothers about what a thrill doulas get from being with them, and how they truly want to be woken in the night to come to a birth; I loved the descriptions from Maddie and others she quoted of relationships between doulas and their clients, showing just how deep a bond can come about from sharing this most intimate of times.

In fact, the only false note in the whole book, for me, was a quote early on from Suzanne Howlett, which read to me as suggesting that women suffering from infertility might just be able to fix it if they tried hard enough. The quote doesn't say that, it says that releasing stress might cause alignment with conception, but I still don't like it, with its implication that anyone who doesn't relax themselves into conceiving is just doing something wrong.

Such a tiny niggle, though. I'm not doing this justice, here. I can't explain the excitement that I felt reading it, the way it fanned my flames, made me desperately want to be a part of this, thinking a series of wild thoughts, I could be a doula! Or a midwife! Or have another baby! Just, really, anything to get to stay involved with this wonderful thing, and no, I'm not denying that so so many people have not had wonderful experiences of birth, but I have, and when it goes well it is the most extraordinary, life-changing, self-defining experience you could imagine. I thought this description was perfect: "Watching the bag of waters balloon in the water before the head is born is like watching a mother lay a beautiful, mother-of-pearl egg" - what a way to show the mysticism and complete everydayness, in combination, of this happening.

In the areas that I properly know about - breastfeeding - it's spot-on, accurate, supportive, again *loving* and tender and gentle and yet unflinching.

And oh, the aspect about stories, about a doula's role as a story-keeper, and the important of listening. This rang so true, both from my experiences as a mother sharing with others, and from being a breastfeeding counsellor. So often I talk to a mother of a newborn, and I ask about the birth so I can get a sense of the context of her call, and it all comes pouring out, she obviously has such a need to tell the story, and I'm honoured to hear it, and they stay with me, they all do, and I feel it again with her, and it shows me so much about her, and lets me see another angle to what's going on with her now, and I LOVE IT, and am I using "love" enough yet? I love the book, and I love the love in the book, and I love the way that both this and the next book I'll write about (H is for Hawk - watch this space) have a kind of love in them that's not a romantic partner-love, it's a deeply felt something else, but love's still the only word for it.

Now, seriously, where do I sign up?

Changing the fairy tales

Welcome to ‘The Forgotten and the Fantastical’ Carnival This post was written especially for inclusion in ‘The Forgotten and the Fantastical’ carnival, hosted by Mother’s Milk Books, to celebrate the launch of their latest collection of fairy tales for an adult audience: The Forgotten and the Fantastical. Today our participants share their thoughts on the theme ‘Fairy tales’. Please read to the end of the post for a full list of carnival participants. ***

If you'd asked me a couple of years back, I'd have told you vaguely that I liked fairy tales. I liked the idea of them, and had fond memories of stories with my grandmother, and of one particular book of illustrated Grimm tales (I think) with the most perfect, detailed pictures you could imagine. I can still bring to mind the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, such detail on the cakes and sweets and biscuits, oh, and the frog sitting by the princess's golden plate and asking, horror of horrors, to drink from her golden cup - in the picture there was drool dripping from his mouth, and horror on her princessy face. I remember a boy covered in treacle and feathers, too, though I've no idea what the story might have been.

It's only getting back to them now (and sadly, not in such a beautiful edition) with a nearly-four-year-old that I realise how crude the basic premise is in so many of the classic fairy stories.

Princess and the pea - prince waits in his castle, auditioning princesses, hoping to find one of unprecedented fragility and girliness
Princess and the frog - man frog buys you dinner gets your ball out of a pond so you're morally obliged to bonk him let him sleep on your golden pillow - but it's ok because he turns out to be a prince so you grit your teeth
Rumpelstiltskin - dad sells his daughter to a king, who locks her up, sets her impossible tasks, and says if she's really really good then eventually he might marry her. (No wonder she promises she'll give his baby away to a funny little stranger)

I could go on, but it's been done before, and with greater skill. It's easy to defend them as just stories, as being simple fun and as also having other more uplifting messages (the princess made a promise to the frog, and you must always keep promises; Rumpelstiltskin was foolish enough to offer a loophole, and you must always take advantage of loopholes). But I really do fear the way we've internalised these messages. Most right-thinking modern people wouldn't agree to the idea that women should wait to be chosen by a man, but we can't stay away from this narrative, the one where the ultimate reward is marriage, obviously to a prince. Sleeping Beauty has her fate set from the beginning, and her redemption is through the kiss of a stranger who she ends up shackled to - she is the powerless woman, her whole life's structure fixed, only freed by a man who effectively gives her the freedom that should have been hers.
I'm struggling to put any of this in an original way, but it's an honest reflection of my unease with fairy tales, and my difficulty with sharing them with my boy. He questions so much but this is also the time when all his values are being shaped, when he is so receptive to everything that comes into his world. I'd not show him violence on the television, or swear in front of him; I try to model gentle and respective interactions with people and ways of talking about them. And yet here the only goal, if you're a woman, is to find someone who will marry you and keep you in style, and if you're a man you only want the princesses, the beautiful, unachievable, hyper-feminine ones, who come with a dowry.
I don't know, in real life, mothers of girls who tell them they need to find a prince. But if we don't argue with the stories, point out the problems and the stupid assumptions and the ridiculous value systems embedded in them, we're not doing right by our children. We tell them not to worry, ogres aren't real, trolls aren't real, witches aren't real; we should add that princes who make it all ok aren't real, women who are worthwhile just because they're pretty aren't real, and there are better ways to start a relationship than being rescued from a dragon.

***

The Forgotten and the Fantastical is now available to buy from The Mother’s Milk Bookshop (as a paperback and PDF) and as a paperback from Amazon.

It can also be ordered via your local bookshop.

Any comments on the following fab posts would be much appreciated:

In ‘Imagination is quantum ergo fairies are real’, Ana, at Colouring Outside the Lines, explains why we should all believe in fairies and encourage our children to do the same.

 ‘Wings’ — Rebecca at Growing a Girl Against the Grain shares a poem about her daughter and explains the fairy tale-esque way in which her name was chosen.

 In ‘Red Riding Hood Reimagined’ author Rebecca Ann Smith shares her poem ‘Grandma’.

Writer Clare Cooper explores the messages the hit movie Frozen offers to our daughters about women’s experiences of love and power in her Beautiful Beginnings blog post ‘Frozen: Princesses, power and exploring the sacred feminine.’

 ‘Changing Fairy Tales’ — Helen at Young Middle Age explains how having young children has given her a new caution about fairy tales.

In ‘The Art of Faerie’ Marija Smits waxes lyrical about fairy tale illustrations.

 ‘The Origins of The Forgotten and the Fantastical’ — Teika Bellamy shares her introduction from the latest collection of fairy tales for an adult audience published by Mother’s Milk Books.

Loving challenges and unsisterly sneering

There are two books I want to write about here, in such contrast to each other. I'm torn about how to go about it, because I loved one, and didn't love the other. I don't want to dedicate pages and pages of space to the one I didn't love, but at the same time I want to explain myself.

Perhaps I should start with the love: Kiss me! How to raise your children with love by Carlos Gonzalez.

I wrote about this, briefly, for the LLLGB magazine, and I don't want to repeat myself. He describes it as "a book in defence of children" and it's not got a complex premise, but it leaves a conscientious parent with a complex challenge.
Very briefly, the book's about treating children as people, not as a separate species, some kind of monsters that need to be controlled. Again and again, he uses the device of a paragraph describing some abominable way of talking to a woman, (ignore her if she cries, tell her to ask again in a nice voice, drag her if she doesn't walk quickly enough for you) and asks why, if this is so shocking when it's about an adult, it doesn't also shock us as a way of talking about children. Somehow this doesn't get hackneyed - perhaps it would if there was much more of it - but instead really made me bang my head up against the way I talk to my own children. I'm definitely on the hippy, attached end of things but I find myself slipping into shouting, impatience, and worst, abusing my power as the adult, the physically stronger one, the one with all the decision making ability, that controls all the resources. No, I don't lock him under the stairs or feed him on dry bread, but reading Kiss me has provoked some real soul-searching, right in the middle of some "transactions" with my boy, and later, in the troubled small hours of the night.
Part of my brain says this is all ridiculous, that of course we need to control children, and teach them who's in charge, and mould their spirits so they're good at taking orders for when they enter the real world. I can't actually justify that, though, can't rationalise it beyond a vague "well, surely...." or "what if...".
If I had to choose one passage that sums it all up for me, it would have to be this piece on limit-setting:

      If our child asks for something which isn't harmful to him, which doesn't destroy the environment, which we can afford, which we have time to give him, let us not say no simply "in order to set him limits" or "to accustom him to being obedient"

How liberating! I love the permission throughout the book to back down, to give in gracefully, and most of all to love your child just as much as you want to. I already knew this stuff, of course I did, but it's hammered home to me the message that my main job, my only important one really, is to love him, as hard and as truly as I possibly can, and to show him that love, and be stable and honest and generous with that love. Any decisions I make from that position will work, and they might not give me quick fixes, but actually will get us there.
(I suppose it's all phronesis really, or that kind of thing - we aspire to the best, and hone our faculties to discern this best. The better, and purer, model of love and lovingkindness that I can show to him, the better able he'll be to apply and demonstrate this himself. I don't want to demonstrate rationing love, or needing to earn it as if it was a salary; I want to show it richly and freely given, from a place of joy, and spreading that joy).

Ah, a segue! What I did there was a bit pretentious, because I dropped phronesis in there, as if I was trying to show I'm clever. But - and this is important - I didn't write I suppose it's all what old el chief Greeko philosopher Aristotle would have called phronesis.

On that note, let's talk about Breast Intentions!

So much hype for this book. In her internet-persona of "The Alpha Parent", Allison Dixley has built up a loyal following for her blog, where she writes mainly about breastfeeding with a focus on how breastfeeding goes wrong and what is wrong with formula feeding.
It may have seemed, on the face of it, that this would expand nicely into a book, and perhaps it could have done, but this isn't nice, and it isn't fair, and for me, it wasn't even entertaining.

I don't want to spend hours writing about this, because I feel a little exasperated about how much time I spent reading the book, and I want to draw a line under it and move on. It also didn't provoke in me the kind of rage that I thought it might - if it had, I could have had fun arguing with it point by point. In fact, I'm lacking the spirit here, so instead of a long piece I can offer you some headline issues with the book:

1. It's uncharitable, or perhaps cruel
This is by far my biggest issue. Let's be clear: I love breastfeeding. I love doing it, and talking about it, and supporting mothers with it. I can't count the hours I've spent on my preparation to become a breastfeeding counsellor and now my work as one, but it's a huge part of my life, and no one does this without feeling very strongly about the worth of it.
Mothers who use formula aren't the enemy, though! I'm just lost, as a reader, from the outset, with the language of "breastfeeding failure" and all the name-calling that follows. I don't buy into the idea that mothers who stopped breastfeeding want excuses and are desperate to set right their public image by explaining themselves. I don't accept a world view that sneers and dismisses them as lazy, weak-willed, or uncommitted to their babies. I'm not interested in pulling apart people's reasons for doing what they did, or in trying to imply they are lesser parents.
As a breastfeeding counsellor, I want to support mothers with meeting their breastfeeding goals. What those goals are isn't up to me, nor is what they do after we talk. And no way on earth is it ok for me to attribute motives for stopping, or for me to attempt a quantitative assessment of her love for her baby.

You could say this aspect of the book was quite obvious, so I shouldn't have picked it up, and you'd be right in that there is no masking of this attitude. I was still surprised, though, at the plain unpleasantness of the tone. I suspect the writer might dismiss me as wishy-washy when I say I really do blame society, in the widest sense, for low breastfeeding rates: I blame insufficient support in the system, and terrible horrible predatory formula marketing, and the media for their constant fanning of the flames - but I can't find any rage or scorn or anything else for a mother who didn't breastfeed for as long as she'd planned. I can't say you, you gave up too easily, you made excuses, you put your own desire for a spa night over your baby's wellbeing. I can't do this because no one, none of us, not even the crunchiest, can say we're doing it all right, that we're every single moment doing the best for our babies. We're constantly balancing and juggling and doing calculations and taking decisions and incorporating our values, and yes I do think that breastfeeding's a massively important one, and a public health issue, but the book that we need here is one about how we help people get past the pressures, not about what wicked beasts non-breastfeeders are!

2.It was a mistake to try and seem academic
595 footnotes. A glossary. An 8-page bibliography.
An attempt to mask the basic snottiness of the book by presenting it as some kind of quasi-academic treatise would, to my mind, have been more credible if there was any depth to any of it. As it is, citing "the philosopher Nietzsche" (as opposed, presumably, to his less well-known brother, the greengrocer Nietzsche) or "The granddaddy of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud" doesn't lend you academic gravitas, it just makes you look like a wally. So many brief mentions of proper thinkers with proper big brains, mostly glibly summarised in a couple of sentences - it reads like a parody of a PhD thesis. When you then combine this with language like "here's the skinny" and "bring it on mofo" it's just laughable - is the book trying to be academically credible, or to be serialised in a teen magazine?

3. I have no idea who it's for
Who's going to read and benefit from this?
People who support breastfeeding? I don't think so. I can only speak for myself, but as I said above I don't want to think of my "customers" in this way. I think an attitude of disdain would shine out and would stop me from meeting a mother where she is. I see and hear all the time the complex web of reasons that mothers doubt, slow down and stop, and applying an analytical framework doesn't really help me in practice. Reading explanations of why people's reasons aren't good enough doesn't help either: it's not my place to assess that.

Keen breastfeeding mothers? Maybe they'd enjoy the validation, but most breastfeeders I know don't really think this way. They don't self-define like this: they'd seem to, if you only read internet forums, where people quite often do pigeonhole themselves as a kind of shorthand, but in their actual lives it's just a thing they do, one of their choices about looking after their babies. And it's a long book to wade through if all you want is a pat on the back - The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding gives the feelgood factor without having to dismiss anyone else.

Keen formula feeding mothers? Not sure they'd want to buy a rant against themselves.

Those who wanted to breastfeed, or to breastfeed for longer? Just no. Everyone dissembles and self-deceives, and no one wants to read about it; more to the point, everyone makes complex decisions, doubts them later, questions themselves, takes the chance to feel terrible about themselves, and most violently doesn't need a bossy stranger hypothesising about their true motivations and dismissing their lived experiences.

  It seems I could, after all, write all night on this  - my copy is packed with post-its marking factual mistakes, heinous copy-editing errors, infuriating assumptions, and offensive language ("schizophrenic" to mean "changing from one point of view to another", really????). But I've spent too much emotional energy on it now.

Fascinating for me to note that Pinter & Martin published both of these books, one so strong and gentle and lovingly challenging, the other trying so hard to be provocative but really just lost in the middle. I didn't hate it, I don't want to go round there with a flaming torch, but I do want to ask "what did you really think this would achieve?" in much the same way as I ask it of my three-year-old when he mindlessly takes a toy from his brother.

Slownesses

Next post was meant to be about books: I was going to do two or three posts on fiction I'd read so far this year, and one on a couple of parenting books, including my thoughts on "that" Alpha Parent book.

And I wanted to do an update on my digital footprints project, and to talk about how interacting more deliberately really does change and enrich your experience.

And my babies, well, my baby and my boy, I wanted to talk about them.

Somehow I'm not managing any of it though. I've been casting around for ways to explain it, and I can't get any further than this:

My heart is so heavy

Everything is slow, and everything is difficult. I can't find a lightness in anything. Actually it's not just my heart, it's all heavy, I'm in thick gloves and a bodysuit and it's all muffled and padded and muted and just sort of bleak.

There's nothing wrong as such. We're getting through, the boys are growing and flourishing, I'm doing my work (just about), the house is in one of its tidier phases, we're dutifully getting through our austere winter veg box each week.

I just can't quite think forward, somehow. I'm one for buzzing with projects and thrilling full of ideas (yes, thrilling is a verb, in this sense, in the engaged way that I mean it, I don't just get thrilled, I thrill). I invented the "Kaffe test" for myself, for when I feel a bit down and gloomy - does looking at a picture of something Kaffe Fasset-y (either his, or in his style, or with some intensity of colour, actually anything from Attic24 will do the job too) give me a lift, a fierce desire to MAKE IT NOW and LICK ALL THE COLOURS?

  
Nope.

Experience tells me that the way forward is to act as if. Keep doing all that daily stuff, nurture the babies, read the books, collect the projects, sign up for the work and hope that at some point the days start to be differentiated again. I'll write on here about some books, and pretend I'm an aspiring writer, an aspiring anything, and if previous doldrums like this are anything to go by, I'll suddenly find myself inadvertently aspiring again, daydreaming about quilts and crochet and blankets and textures and colours, galloping through books, churning stuff out. Suddenly and, I hope, soon.

The Sunday night feeling

Oh, how I love Mondays, and mornings, and new terms, and new pencil cases, and best of all new years. All chances for a fresh start, for looking back on the day/week/month/term year before and saying what can I build on, what should I discard, what am I proud of, what have I learned.

So I've no idea why I've not been able to call up this spirit yet for 2015. It may be the horrible timing of the baby being ill - he started grumbling and fussing on Christmas day and just got more and more miserable, pretty much a week of constant crying, desperate need to sleep but inability to do this without a half hour lead in of rocking and swaying, only staying asleep if held, and in exactly the right position. I'd been hoping for a few days of gathering myself up, tidying things inside and out, reviewing and reflecting and restoring and consolidating and preparing, and instead I paced for hours and hours, and I'll admit to some weeping and cursing too - it was just a grim week, and it's taken from my already sparse resources.

Somehow the year ahead doesn't seem to be brimming with possibility: it looks like a trudge, a series of days where success would be treading water, keeping my mouth just over the surface, not letting anything get any more chaotic. And it's pretty gloomy to have your goals being no more ambitious than staying just about level with entropy.

So what now?

I don't think I'm quite in the place for massive "stuff" goals, not for this year. Big boy will be four in May, little boy one in June, so they need me a lot, and their day to day needs are going to be consuming no matter what I do. My maternity leave is over so I'm back to working in the evenings - at an absolute minimum I need to get in 15 hours each week, but if we want any wriggle room then it needs to be more than that. I'm aware this sounds like nothing, but that's 2.5 hours a night with Sundays off, and if the children aren't both asleep until 8 that means I have to work till 10.30, or later if (ha!) I have to stop and resettle them several times. It exhausts me just thinking about it.

Looks like it needs to be the year of attitudes, and cultivating my ability to "act as if". I've let myself off the 1st January hook - obviously I missed that boat - and instead am going to deem my own new year to start on a Monday, on 5th Jan, just after I get through one more weekend. And in this new Helen-year:

1. I will act as if I am a patient and tolerant mother, even when there's an inner scream and I'm bored of glitter and dirt and bodily fluids and I don't want to carry anyone around and I want to be asleep.
2. I am a writer. There are things out there, published, with my name on, and I write this blog, and I'll be doing all sorts this year - I will think of myself as a person who writes, which will let me carry on being one.
3. All the reading stuff that I wrote about in my last post - I'll read what and when I can, without a big self-important goal of covering Great Literature, but choosing what I'll enjoy and benefit from, and being sure to reflect on it and acknowledge it. Whenever I have a gap in my fiction-reading I forget how much it does for me, and how much I need that mental escape, the transportation to somewhere else.
4. Must remain conscious of the need to avoid bitterness: again, I've written about this before, but it's still warping me with no obvious benefit. I've got to learn that other people's happiness doesn't steal mine, and that we all have different opportunities and resources, and that, most importantly, there's nothing at all fruitful about comparing my insides with other people's outsides. Yes, on Facebook everyone's always beaming, and their three-year-olds had rosy-cheeked saintly Christmases where they played blissfully and absorbedly and gratefully with their toys, and ate without a fuss, and of course doted, as they always do, on their baby siblings - but that's not what happened here, and there's no point wishing it had. And everyone else's blog is beautiful and they have artistic coffee breaks every day and they take pictures of themselves making gorgeous craft projects and of their children smiling (those rosy cheeks again!) and they just get so much done and have so much exciting going on....STOP. It just doesn't get me anywhere. I can't know how complete the picture is from others, and even more importantly it doesn't matter, and all that thinking about it does is make me bad-tempered and ungrateful about my many blessings. So this year I will enjoy my friends' happiness, and maybe quietly daydream about having an aspirational lifestyle, but I will be on constant guard against allowing jealousy or negativity creep in.

What a gloomy, self-absorbed post, but it's honest, and it's a sort of purging - just one more day now of my version of this year, and a fresh start on Monday, and new shelves to fill, and my new diary about to come, and time to continue being at the centre of two small boys' universes, and so much to read and learn and do....there's hope yet.

Book shame

Just a quick one here, though I'm hoping to be back tomorrow-ish with some words about my hopes for 2015.
For now, though, an issue that's been vexing me: what do I feel about the books that I love? Or, can I get over my apparent need to write or talk only about the more literary, impressive, books that I enjoyed, and be more open, with readers of this blog but also with myself.  Repeat to self: if you enjoyed a book, you enjoyed it. They don't all have to be great literature, and there is no need to be ashamed of anything that I'm reading.

It's so hard! And it's all about the constructed self-image, not that I take a great deal of care about this but I do like to think of myself as someone with good taste (I suppose we all do) and I'm also aware that I go on about how little time I have. Maybe my imaginary reader scorns me for guzzling my way through the Susan Hill series of Simon Serailler books, or for having enjoyed  All Hallows at Eyre Hall as much as I did. I look at these and am fairly confident they're not going to win prizes or be widely known in 100 years, and one of my inner voices says that this must mean they're not "worth it"...worth what? My reading time, or my writing time, or the reading time of anyone who visits this blog or my Goodreads page? Or is it even more laughably conceited than that - "these books do not merit my endorsement, because I am a Serious Reader who must only be associated with Very Serious Books"?

I am packed with self-loathing when I find myself suspecting this is how I'm thinking, and so an early resolution for next year is this: I will read what I enjoy, which might sometimes mean a fine aesthetic appreciation, sometimes a furious socio-political engagement, sometimes a happy nostalgia, and sometimes the pure reading pleasure of something I can't put down. I will not engage with the part of me that wants to put the books in boxes as worthy or unworthy, "high quality" or "low quality", and will test out a new assumption: a book is "high quality" if it made me involve myself with it, and kept me reading - I can trust myself on this, and share my thoughts on it. It will improve me as a reader, and as a writer, because the more I can identify this magic ingredient, the better I'll be at spotting it as a reader, at helping to draw it out as an editor, and even trying to produce it myself as a writer. I'll go back again to Francine Prose, and learn from her every word, and I will get over myself a bit!

All this will work with the help of my glorious new Paperwhite (reading! All the time! In the dark! One-handed! New books at a single click!) and I swear I will write about them all, even if they only get a few lines, and this sort of honesty will improve everything. Though I'd never admit it if I read Fifty Shades of Grey.... 

Adding a phrase

My singing teacher gave me a piece of wonderful advice.

Sometimes you're learning a song and the breath control is hard, because the phrases are long. Take, for example, the first line of Linden Lea, an English classic and grade 4 piece, I think:

"Within the woodlands, flow'ry gladed, by the oak tree's mossy moot"

Even if you're taking the whole song at a bracing gallop, it's a long one, and because it's right at the start of the song you're not quite in flow yet, but it spoils it if you breathe in the middle. When I started singing this I'd always be turning a bit purple by the end, and "mossy moot" would come out as a hissy, last-bit-of-air-escaping-tyre, squeak.

How to get this better? Practise the phrase, not as it stands, but with an extra sub-clause at the start, so sing, again and again:

"Within the wood, within the woodlands, flow'ry gladed, by the oak tree's mossy moot"

Your breath budget now has to last a few syllables longer, and you get used to spreading it right to the end (with perhaps still a tiny bit of hissy squeaking at the end). Then, sing the phrase again with the extras cut off the start, and wonder of wonders, you've got loads to spare, you cruise through it easily and triumphantly, so much that you're not even having to take in a massive gasp before starting "the shining grass blades, timber-shaded, now do quiver underfoot" (another long one).

As with singing, so with life. When I had a small baby, who rapidly became a toddler, I thought my life was full to bursting. Meeting his needs was consuming every scrap I had to offer, aside from what I spent on work. Then I had baby 2, and more than double the demands on my time (surprisingly, the existence of a smiling, disney-eyed snuggly mother-magnet doesn't make a three year old less clingy), and gosh, these six months have been hard. But when Bonzo goes off to playgroup some mornings, my time sighs and stretches into the space, I revel in the slowness of life with the baby, we potter and chatter and burble and tickle and it is easy, so easy.

That was step 1, the first extension to the phrase, and it was building up my strength and skills at handling two. Then, enter the scruffy dog, a beautiful shabby needy lurcher, and now there are three warm bodies that all want to be touching me, three potential danger sources all of whom could hurt any of the others (and themselves - so there are nine different hurting combinations available, before you count one of them hurting several at once). The chaos levels have stepped up further, and the carpets are hairier, but the big blessing turns out to be the way that it's just drawn my breath out for longer. Now, when H goes to work and takes the dog with him, "all" I have to deal with is two children and there are "only" two sets of needs (mine don't count). I feel foolish at how well this mind-trick is working on me, but at the same time it's wonderful. I don't feel more overwhelmed with three dependents; I feel more capable at all the times I only have two, or one.

Of course all this sends me back to my terror in pregnancy about whether I could possibly hold enough love for both of my boys, whether there was enough of me to go round. It turns out that there is, that actually the "me" has grown (no, "I have grown" doesn't say what I want it to), and that my mothering muscles are strengthening with each day of (tear-inducing, soul-breaking, exhausting) exercise. 


Now all I need to do is work out what to use all that spare breath on...

Dr Jack Newman's Guide to Breastfeeding

Dr Jack Newman's Guide to Breastfeeding, Jack Newman and Teresa Pitman, 2014, Pinter & Martin

Shout it from the rooftops! The famous "Dr Jack" has issued a new edition of his breastfeeding book, and I was thrilled to get a review copy because he's such a well-respected man, has coined so many of the phrases that have been incorporated into the narrative of breastfeeding, and has some fantastic material available online.

It's a huge book, and dense, and I couldn't stop myself from opening it straight away. I've really taken my time reading it, though - partly because there's so much of it, and partly because I feel so many different things about it so I've been trying to sort these out in my head before writing about it.

One-line verdict? Yes, buy it if you're interested in breastfeeding, particularly if you're involved in any way at all with supporting breastfeeding mothers. But, don't make it your only breastfeeding book.

I could expand on it like this or, more easily for me, give you a few examples of what I loved and what I didn't.

I loved the authoritative tone. This man is an expert, and not afraid to say so. He has vast experience of mothers in his clinic, and writes with extreme confidence about what has worked for them and what will therefore work for others. It's an exciting contrast to most other current breastfeeding books, which are written by women and tend to reflect that in their tone and style. Now, let's be clear, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding is hands-down my favourite and is, as the title might suggest, exceedingly womanly in tone. It might have been written by a favourite sister or aunt, and I love it so much for this - I feel the authors are standing right alongside me. But, (and this is a big, personal, FOR ME, but) it's refreshing to read a man's point of view, when I spend most of my time these days communing with women.

I didn't love the flipside of this tone, which is the description of "the mother" and "the baby" rather than "you" and "your baby". It's one thing that suggests to me that the book is best suited to breastfeeding supporters rather than breastfeeding mothers. It also, to my mind, doesn't do justice to Teresa Pitman's contribution - she's listed as co-author but the book is written from the "I" point of view but that "I" is clearly Dr Jack, even though I've no doubt she's contributed significant amounts to the book.

I loved the challenge of some of the assertions, making me think more about some of the breastfeeding truths I have held to be self evident...the best example would be the assertion that if a baby of, say, four months, isn't growing sufficiently on breastmilk alone, it's better in many cases to introduce solids rather than formula milk (this is a gross simplification of the argument - you'd need to read it in full for the nuances, and the intermediate steps that are suggested). I subscribe to the "middle of the first year is usually the right time for the gentle introduction of solids" idea, and was slightly shocked at seeing an expert advocating introduction at four months. The argument sort of makes sense, though, and challenges me to think harder about what is "best" in a situation where breastfeeding isn't going too well.
He also writes in such a powerful way about the virtues of at-breast supplementation, and the evils of sippy-cups, and again this isn't the only truth, but it's just wonderful to see such strong views expressed so consistently. It forces me to examine exactly what I believe and why.

I didn't love the way that claims are sometimes flung about without citations to support them. Another thing about the WAB is that, perhaps because it is so warm and fuzzy, its authors take great pains to support all of their factual statements with proper, up to date, references to research. Dr Jack doesn't feel the same need to do this because, well, he's Dr Jack, and what he says goes. I've no doubt that there's science behind the factual statements, but I was frustrated by not being able to flick to a reference and then go and read more behind a claim - I don't want to believe it just because he says so.

I loved the scientific explanations of areas such as how drugs pass into breastmilk, and how breastmilk helps immunity. These were pitched at the right sort of level for me, written with the same authority as the rest of the book, and have enhanced and deepened my own understanding. I've not seen another popular breastfeeding book that does this, and it's a really positive dimension to the book that would on its own justify adding it to your library. I'm not in a position to tell mothers a drug is safe or not to take, but where she's got information about it already, I like it that I'm in a better position to explain this to her and help her understand it - it's a new go-to reference for me, along with a copy of Hale that I was lucky to inherit.
In general, all the technical stuff is just great - I've not seen anywhere else a step by step set of instructions on using gentian violet, or such a thorough systematic explanation of reasons for breast pain, or such good illustrative pictures of positions and techniques (though I didn't much like the one that showed Dr Jack's white-sleeved arm reaching in and expressing an anonymous breast).

I didn't love the "case studies". Some of them made useful points, but I felt that some were included mainly to illustrate the way Dr Jack heroically stepped in and saved a foolish woman from the error of her ways. Actually, that's slightly unfair - they're generally about how other healthcare providers didn't give good advice, but the structure of some of them - a straight telling of the story, with interjections in italics describing what Dr Jack thinks is wrong with what a mother had been told - is a little bit sneery. I suppose again this tells you about my own background and my previous loves - I want to read mothers' stories in their own words, like the two fabulous Flower books (Adventures in gentle discipline and Adventures in tandem nursing), with a bit of heart to them. And the mothers I work with, on our helpline, or in meetings, or one to one on my sofa, or at a noisy dropin - they're not case studies to me. They're rich and complex and often vulnerable people, or at least they're in a vulnerable time of their lives, and for the time I'm with each mother I'm really "with" her, not detached in the way that would let me see her as a case study. You'll see this isn't something wrong with the book - it's a very natural reflection of who the author is, ie a proper real clinical doctorman, not a provider of mother-to-mother support. But for me, as a person, it was less appealing.

I loved the pieces on colic and on late-onset low milk supply. On colic, there's nothing revolutionary in there but it's warm, reassuring, sensible, and feels reassuringly systematic, a sort of "try that, then this" - it's a chapter I'd be really happy to recommend directly to a breastfeeding mother, rather than needing to be mediated through a supporter. And the stuff on late-onset supply problems is fascinating because he essentially says that you can sometimes get away with sloppy technique in the early weeks if you have a great supply, but the effects then can show later, when your supply stabilises but your baby's not taking milk well (there are other reasons too). Again, challenging, and a difficult way of thinking to present to a mother, in fact I think I misjudged it the other day with someone, making it sound as though she was storing up problems - but it's informed my thinking, and deepened my knowledge, and will be a section I go back to again and again. 

In summary I really did enjoy it, and it's already got some pages bookmarked and has taken a place on my reference shelf: in fact, I've already had cause to pull it out in conversation with a mother. I'd unequivocally recommend it to someone who already has WAB and wants to expand their library to give them more technical information for supporting mothers, but I'd then say well, read it with your critical eye on, question whether all the facts are truly facts, and don't forget that it's legitimate to come to breastfeeding support from a different place, a motherly place - don't be so dazzled by his masculine authority that you forget there are many ways of skinning a cat. Mothers are, in my view, the ultimate experts on their own babies, not in a brainless "happy mummy, happy baby" way, but in a careful learning of listening to your own instincts and your own baby, and learning each other's language. Nothing can override this, not even a very knowledgeable doctor.

Maybe only one reader of my blog will "get" this last line, and he may not have made it to the end of this post, but if he has, just for him, the line that springs to mind is "Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me". Anyone else, I'm happy to expand on that if (as seems unlikely) you're interested.


I should make it clear that I had a review copy from Pinter & Martin, my favourite publisher in the whole world apart from Mother's Milk Books, though I'm also developing quite a crush on Praeclarus Press, and these are only the ones that cover mothering-y stuff, don't get me started on my fiction list. Also, in case this looks familiar, I wrote a shorter review of the book for inclusion in LLLGB's "Breastfeeding Matters" members' magazine, with one of my other hats on.

Digital footprints, or trying to interact

I made a bold statement on twitter today - I'm planning to spend a week or two really consciously deepening my digital footprint. Perhaps this phrase has common use, perhaps not: I'm using it to mean I want to acknowledge online content that's held some meaning or pleasure for me, whether that's through a simple "like" or "favorite", a share or retweet, or a comment on a blog.

Some of this has come about from a conversation with a friend the other day where I was explaining how I use online material. I always have facebook and twitter open as tabs on my browser, and whenever I get a couple of minutes at the PC I glance through, and open up any links that look vaguely interesting as new tabs. Then one of my boys needs me. Some hours, or days, later, I might have some at-PC reading time, and then I'll cast my eyes over the million open tabs, and read through some of the things I've opened earlier.

I love this way of getting myself lots of great stuff to read, but I fear I've become a passive and lazy consumer, and it bothers me that, particularly when I'm reading people's personal blogs, it's just rude to take, take, take, and never even acknowledge. So, I want to put myself out there, and to engage with anyone who's written something that entertains me or makes me think, instead of nodding silent approval in my head and closing the tab. I love it so much when anyone comments on my blog, even when it's a one-worder - the feeling that you're not talking into completely empty space is so very gratifying.

To help persuade myself, I brainstormed some of the things that stop me from commenting - there are plenty, but none of them are great reasons.

The blog or article writer is too important to care what I think or whether I liked it  - this hits me when I know someone has a mass of followers, or when the piece already has 300 comments. What will it add if I also say "great post!"?
Well, on this one I tell myself that it must be very boosting to have 300 people commenting on your post, but probably even more boosting if the other 500 who read and enjoyed it were to say so too. Also, the vanilla "great post!" comments are quite dull, so the challenge for me is to say what I liked about it, even if it's only a line or two - I've troubled myself to read it, so why not trouble myself to think for just a couple of minutes longer about why exactly I thought it was so great?

I don't have anything to add - the writer already covered it so well  - this applies to some of the more polished blogs that I read regularly. Basically I'm awed by the writer's skill or knowledge or experience or sheer articulacy, and I don't want to sully their page with my adolescent admiration or pretentious attempts to join in. Yes, I know. I think with this one I just need to believe that if someone is putting their content "out there" then they probably are interested in responses to it, even if they're a bit incoherent.

I don't want to look like a stalker - is this just me? When a blogger posts regularly I may well read all of his or her posts, but fear being "that commenter" who always pops up and says something, as if they were unhealthily obsessed with the blogger. This is probably most relevant to the blogs with a smaller readership and few comments- do I look lurky and weird if there's exactly one comment per post, and it's always from me?
Here, I need the courage of my convictions. It shouldn't matter if I'm the only commenter, and I also need to look at my own responses. I've never read a comment on this blog and thought "oh no, her again" - it wouldn't occur to me. When people comment regularly I love it, they become one of the audience that I have in mind when I'm writing, and actually I mourn it when they stop, because I fear they've become bored of me.
If I'm enjoying someone's work, I should be proud to tell them that every time I enjoy a piece of it, and if they're putting so much out there, then it suggests they're happy to get plenty of feedback.

He/she never responds to comments - again, a loaded one for me. We "shouldn't" (no, I don't know where I'm getting this normative statement from) only comment on blogs to get validation in return, so it "shouldn't" matter if the author doesn't acknowledge comments, or only acknowledges the particularly interesting ones (which may well not be mine). It does sting, though, particularly if you've tried hard to add something to the discussion, an intellectual contribution or an honest offering of your own story.
This might be one where I need to monitor what happens. I do think that if I was visiting someone's blog really regularly, always commenting, and never hearing anything in return, I might need to take this as a strong indication that the author isn't that interested in engaging with me. But, I also need to bear in mind that I'm not brilliant at responding to comments myself, even though I'm always thrilled to read them. Perhaps I see them at night on my phone then don't get round to a response when I get to the computer, or perhaps I can't think of anything to add to the conversation, and am not good enough at accepting that a gracious acknowledgement is still much better than silence.

I disagree with what's said in the post - if I find something really offensive, I might not want to engage because I suspect the author isn't someone I want to spend my precious time with. But if it's an interesting debate, and I feel a kinship with the author, then I'd enjoy a bit of constructive disagreement, and would hope he or she would, too.

I found the post uninteresting  - here I let myself off the hook. If it just didn't spark anything for me, and it's someone I've never read anything from before, I think it's fine just to let it go, as you would with a neutral stranger at a bus stop. If, on the other hand, it's someone I know and usually enjoy reading, perhaps I can still engage, by adding to their topic. After all, something had made me click on the link originally, even if it was only an interesting title - by commenting, I might get some conversation that takes us further into that subject.

I'm worried about "mixing causes" - not just in the LLL sense, but more generally. My online persona is somewhat confused - here on the blog I talk quite a lot about books and quite a lot about babies, with the books being all sorts of things; on facebook, my children are the main subject; on twitter there's quite a bit of work stuff. I don't really make the link very explicit - while my identity isn't hidden here, it's also not exactly shouted, and I don't use many photos or names; I don't generally share my posts via facebook (though I think I might with this one - trusting that only the very interested will get through it); I only tend to tweet about book-related posts not the more personal ones. Still, I'm aware that anyone interested can link up the three and it's just a little bit weird for me. If I comment on an accountancy blog using my blogger profile, then people mainly interested in FRS 102 might stumble upon my post about my miscarriage; if someone comes across from the Pinter & Martin book club they might be baffled by the posts on here about other books, and even more baffled by the financial instruments tweets.
I'm not sure why this is a problem, though - I'm not on a quest to accumulate followers (except, in another sense, aren't we all?) and I'm not ashamed of any of the personal experiences I share on here. If someone I was at school with when I was 15 and am now halfheartedly facebook friends with finds me on this blog and reads my outpourings, what's the worst that can happen? She can laugh at me. I'll live.

Writing on a smartphone is a nightmare  - well, this one's true. But it's where I come back to the point that engagement matters, and that casual interaction with any material doesn't do it justice. I need some kind of system for marking things for follow up if I read them on my phone and want to comment, or I need to get quicker at using my phone keyboard, or I need to permit myself sometimes to write only short comments, because this is still better than the "read and run" approach.

I'm too busy writing my own stuff to write about other people's stuff  - meanness! I want to be more generous. I want to say you, "mummy blogger" who thinks you're talking to yourself, you're not, I read that account of your day and I felt every minute of it with you. I want to tell these indefatigable book reviewers that I love what they're doing for me, that they let me feel sometimes that I've read things I've no time for, and they've let me feel clever and inspired. I want the people who write about writing to keep on writing about writing so that sometime I can move from reading about writing to actual writing, and how can they know I want them to do this unless I tell them so, and tell them which bits I loved, and why?

This is what it comes down to. I love the range and depth of what I find to read across the internet, and particularly on blogs, and I want this environment to stay this rich, and to get richer, and I want to be woven into the tapestry, not to be at the sides watching in silence.

Think of it as Kipling, substituting "internet" or the hideous "blogosphere" for "garden":

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:-" Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives

I'm off out with my dinner-knife, coming to a gravel-path near you.

Centre

When you start to learn the basics of throwing pots, you're desperate to get going. You watch a demonstration, someone sitting there with the clay singing through their hands, rising, falling, charmed like a snake, soothed and coaxed into beautiful symmetry, smoothed by the patter of their words.

Then you try it yourself, sling a lump on the wheel, start it moving, have a stab at getting it centred, then rush, rush, get your thumb in there, start pushing, pulling, you want it to grow, you want to make a thing like you just saw her make! And it collapses. A tiny assymmetry at the start gets amplified with each turn, but by the time the sides are coming up it's too late, you can't do anything about it, so you keep going, maybe turn the wheel faster, pull harder, try and push it back where you wanted, mutter, look around, chuck more water on, then BAM it's down, it's off, your whole top edge has seared off sideways and is slumped in the water catcher, while the remnants of the base spin on, mocking you with their broken misshaped edges.

The key is to centre the clay, and I don't think it's a skill you can explain, because it comes from somewhere way beyond and behind language. All you can do is get it in roughly the right place on the wheel, set it going, put your hands there and feel, feel where it's not right then brace one hand, firmly but without gripping to make dents, and place the other one just so, on the top, angled down, press it exactly right and breathe with it. It's moving all the time, you can see it as trying to get away from you or you can say wait, this clay is singing to me, it's urging me to get it centred, to make it whole and clean and complete and ready to begin, and you relax your whole body apart from your listening hands, and switch off your brain apart from the bit that can pick up this song, and you wait, and lean, and adjust, and balance, and suddenly there it is, that sweet spot, like a humming glass, it's centred. If you have to ask whether it's right, then it's not, there's no mistaking it when you've got it.

Of course you can mess up the pot from there, and I usually do, and of course getting your clay centred isn't something you do right once then never struggle with again. But when it works, oh the physical and spiritual joy of it, the satisfaction of knowing that you listened well.

Why this, now?
Because it's exactly the same feeling as coaxing a baby down to sleep in your arms or a sling. There's a pattern of movements which can be reliable, but to make it work you have to pour your energy into a special focus on the feel of your baby's body, where the tension's going, how to correct his motion with yours. One sway-step might work to step him down from the world to begin with, but it changes as he floats away. In the critical few minutes between awake and asleep, your breathing has to align, your movements constantly reflecting and stilling his, your senses all alert to where his attention might prickle and grab and splutter to the surface, distressed at being pulled out but unable to resist for himself. It's a musical kind of magic, a skill you relearn every time, and the sweetest of sweet spots when it works - if you listen hard enough, you can feel the moment when it's truly sleep, the moment when once more you have done your job well.

As for the rest of the analogy, no, I don't think I believe my children will grow up wonky if I don't always do very well at helping them to sleep. But I do think the start matters, I think we set patterns and more importantly these early years define our relationship, how well we can listen to and respond to each other, how smooth the dance can be.

And one day I'll get the chance to cover my hands in clay again.

The narrow road to the deep north - Booker shortlist #5

I'm banging out posts this evening because I feel a moral obligation to have as many of my thoughts published as I can before the prize is announced.
No, I won't be getting through the whole list before tomorrow evening but will be trying to read a little more of the Mukherjee so I can make an official pronouncement of my view some time in the middle of the afternoon (glorious solipsism here, yes, I do truly know that no one could care less what my view is or when I express it, but it feels as though it matters to write as if someone did).

So, the Flanagan.
I don't know what to make of this one. I struggled to get going with it, but it did draw me in, and had me turning pages and even carrying it around like I was with the Smith. I cared (somewhat) about the people in it, and I shuddered where I was meant to at all the grim POW bits.

It's not taken my heart, though, and careful thought says this is for two reasons:

1. Somehow it seems calculating. Take a gruesome subject, or a subject that affords gruesomeness, and milk it in as much detail as possible, interspersing it with a "human interest" angle that makes the book seem more ambitious and hence a bigger achievement. This basic plan is there, and has been followed, but you can still see the pencil lines. I've a kind of distaste for books where a true story, or true situation, is milked for artistic return like this - it's the same as my distaste for Holocaust fiction, unless it's done incredibly, remarkably, heart-stoppingly well (I'm thinking of Fugitive Pieces here, which follows the same schema really, but does it with such perfect beauty that it doesn't matter).

2. Having said this, with the structure the author has chosen, the book just needed more editing. If you're going to flip-flop in time and between locations you need to do it really elegantly, and with an eye to the ease of your reader, unless you're deliberately introducing confusion as some kind of literary metaphor. It doesn't seem to me that it was deliberate in this case, more careless, and someone needed to take a pair of scissors to the MS and rearrange some of the early scenes in a different order.
Still on the editing, I recall reading once a simple piece of advice for writers not to give two of your key characters names beginning with the same initial. This sounds so petty, but actually it does matter. Unless you're really properly a well-established Great Writer, you need to remove all the impediments between your reader and comprehension - it's arrogant not to, to expect them to fight through this. No, Dorrigo and Darky aren't that similar, and thinking for a minute about the context is enough to work out who we're reading about now, but I resented having to put that minute in.

I'm perhaps not a writer's ideal reader: I don't treat the work with reverence, and I certainly don't set aside long silent concentrated hours for reading, ensuring I note subtexts, taking notes to aid my comprehension, and so on. Except, if a book earned it, I would. I read War and Peace with the dovegreyreader family tree bookmark slotted into the front of my e-reader, because I needed it, and the book repaid every bit of my investment in it. Even with shortlist #6, the Mukherjee, I groaned when I saw a family tree and a map at the start, but I'm using them, because there's something about the quality of the text that's making me want to.

If I'm in doubt, though, about whether these pages are earning each precious minute I'm spending on them, I want to read without deliberate barriers. I want to play guessing games about interesting stuff, like the characters' motivations, or whodunnit, or which bits of what the narrator says is unreliable - not about which D-person is which.

One more thing - I'll not write a spoiler, but there's a plot twist of sorts in there near the end which was a damp squib and, to my mind, added nothing.

I didn't really intend to devote a long post to sticking the boot into the Flanagan because I actually did quite enjoy it, and thought it had more literary merit than any of the others I've finished so far, apart from the Smith. I suppose it's that those two points above really held ,me up from finding it anywhere near as valuable as I could have done, and that's a big shame given that a good strong critical editor, and a long enough editing process that would allow time for this sort of issue to rise slowly to the surface, could have moved this from being a good book into a very good book, even if it couldn't reach the heights of greatness.

To rise again at a decent hour - Booker shortlist #3

I'm posting not-in-order here, because I loved the Smith so much I had to write about it first.
Only a quickie on this one. Another good reason for leaving it a little while before writing about it was that it had struck me as ephemeral, and I wanted to give it chance to settle to test my instincts on that.
Those instincts turned out, for me, to be right. I can't say I didn't enjoy reading it - I read Ferris's first novel however many years ago when it came out, and this is very much the same tone, so it made me laugh, and is the only one on the shortlist to have done that.
But it's got so little substance that I couldn't possibly think of it as a prizewinner - there's no deeper meaning, no complexity of language, somehow not enough display of skill. I *know* writing funny prose is in itself a skill, but I can't help wanting something more writerly, when you're talking about a proper serious prize like the Booker.
Less than a fortnight after finishing this and all I could tell you about it is:
- the protagonist is a dentist who has a range of existential crises and supports the Red Sox
- there's some kind of weird conspiracy about a suppressed race who have suffered more than the Jewish people
- the dentist's receptionist is called Connie, and he used to date her
 - mobile phones are referred to throughout as "me-machines"

Honestly, I don't recall how it ended, or quite how the dentist was involved in the conspiracy, or the names of any other characters (including the protagonist, actually) - it just wasn't complex enough to leave any barbs in me. I still enjoyed it more than the Jacobson, and would endorse it as a beach read or something for a long train journey, but not a prize winner.