What is Crib Notes Newsletter?
Crib Notes is a monthly newsletter featuring succinct book reviews for new and busy mothers, along with my thoughts on reading in the margins of motherhood.
Before the birth of my sons, books were the love of my life. Since becoming a mother, reading has become more essential than ever to my sense of self. It helps me feel tethered to the woman I was before I had a baby. With it, motherhood brought an onslaught of visceral new emotions, and these coloured my reading habits. In the early days, I sometimes felt so vividly alive that I sought writing to match this mental incandescence. At other times, exhausted from rocking a baby who cried endlessly, I craved comfort. Sometimes I wanted books which dug deep into motherhood and held it up to the light; sometimes I wanted escape. I was also newly impatient when it came to choosing my reading matter: those slivers of time I had to myself were so precious, I could not waste them on books I wasn’t enjoying.
Crib Notes is inspired by my experience of reading on borrowed time: during night-feeds and nap-times, during rare hour-long stretches and, more often, in greedy snatches whilst my toddler surreptitiously slides his fishfingers onto the kitchen floor.
In each issue of Crib Notes, I recommend a handful of books selected for different moods and attention-spans, with my thoughts on how and when to read them. I hope you enjoy your hard-earned, well-deserved reading time, whatever you choose to read!
