Chief amongst these was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and as you can imagine I read the book with a particular interest in determining what characters, or episodes, or deft turns of phrase had made her so recommend this book to me …
Book two on the list was Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. This was more encouraging. It is the story of, among other things, a beautiful woman who falls for a guy who gets arrested and then hides himself in an insane asylum for years so as not to embarrass her … In the words of Bulgakov, “Love caught us suddenly, leapt at us like a murderer appearing from nowhere in an alley, and struck us both down at once. Like lightning, like a Finnish knife! However, afterwards she insisted it was not so, that we had loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing one another, never having met…”
The toast went on—not just about the books I’d given him, but about everything I’d given him so far and everything he’d given me and what we both planned to give each other in the future. He ended with a quote from Great Expectations. What could I say? I was humbled and I was dazzled and I was sure. Shortly after we’d met, I introduced Michael to Bob, and he came up with his own variation, the Blob—Big List of Books—which he put on his computer. Not long after that, he entered Buddenbrooks into his Big List of Books. He keeps his Blob still.
CHAPTER 18
The Hunger Games
No Time to Read
I’d just given birth after a long and well-medicated labor that ended with my second son, Theodore. He was an unexpectedly immense nine-and-a-half-pound baby, fat and uncomplaining. My recovery was swift. This was my third child and the easiest of my childbirths. Most mothers would have bolted from the hospital, especially if their two other children at home were still rather young. But I chose to stay an extra day.
I wish I could say it was because I worried that the new baby’s siblings, Tobias and Beatrice, two and four years old respectively, would steal attention away from him. But this would not be completely honest. In truth, I stayed in the hospital because I was in the middle of The Hunger Games. I’d started reading it in early labor, paused so that I could give birth, and then picked it back up to read almost immediately after Teddy was born and latched on, reading as I nursed. It was a genuine page-turner, and for once, with great pleasure, I had time to turn the pages.
Nobody could interrupt to ask for a snack. Nobody needed me to wrestle with a shoe. I didn’t have to furrow my brow through background shrieks of wants and needs, or anticipate who would ask next for help tracking down a misplaced lovey. I hadn’t read like this for years.
Glued to the story of teenagers murdering each other for survival, I hardly noticed whether Teddy ate or slept. When will the rebellion begin, I wanted to know. Which suitor would the killer heroine Katniss choose? It was fine for me to turn my attention to these matters. This was my third child and I knew what I was doing, babywise. I expertly breastfed him as I raced through the pages with one finger, each of us occupied and contented. It wasn’t until halfway through the final book in the trilogy that I realized Teddy was taking an awfully long time to tank up. Turns out, he hadn’t been latched on properly the entire time. And here I was reading a book called The Hunger Games! Once I put the book down, I returned to my resting emotional state of maternal guilt.
These lunatic years of turbo lactivism, nursing my children until they were weaned, were tainted not by formula but by the competing desire to read while they fed. Breastfeeding your children can be a beautiful, bonding experience when it does not involve undue pain or inconvenience. But let me be clear: it is also a perfect time for reading, the mom version of dad hanging out on the toilet with an iPad. Everything about breastfeeding lends itself to the practice. The dedicated nursing pillows prop up books as well as they do babies. The baby, staring off into the middle distance, doesn’t seem bothered and may even be enjoying the story in some way. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” leaves the nursing mother unusually calm and focused. I felt the stories more.
This nurse-reading opportunity made itself known early on. A few months after my first child was born, I was working from home as a freelancer, taking a self-imposed “maternity leave” from writing books and chasing down magazine and newspaper assignments, when an editor at the New York Times Book Review asked me to review a book. It was supposed to be my time off, but since I was the one giving and taking that time, the rules behind this policy were distinctly loose. I read the e-mail request, then looked over at Beatrice. She was zonked out peacefully in her bassinet, a real sleeper. This was an infant who slumbered by our side even as Michael and I watched Black Hawk Down at full volume twelve inches away. “Sure,” I e-mailed back. “Send it over.”
The book arrived and it was charming, The Lady and the Panda, which told the story of Ruth Harkness and her efforts to bring the first panda bear from China to America, a tale distinguished by a complicated heroine, adorable baby pandas, and a tragic ending. Over this absorbing narrative, I learned how to balance my daughter on my nursing pillow, prop up my book, and blissfully engage with both. The review was glowing.
Two years later, another baby, another e-mail from the Book Review. “Sure,” I wrote back, glancing contentedly at Tobias, only four weeks old and fast asleep.
The book arrived and Tobias woke up, as babies are wont to do after those first deceptively somnolent weeks. He promptly issued a whole set of demands. He would sleep only if tightly swaddled with arms immobilized, and at the same time and rather determinedly, he would sleep only swaddle-free, his arms swinging wildly overhead. Or, two minutes later, he would sleep only if I laid him across my lap and sat still and silent and yet somehow, at the same time, only while I held him aloft, cradling him back and forth with a knee-bending sway, cooing rhythmically. I scrambled to keep up with his shifting parameters, double guessing and waiting for maternal know-how to arrive at a definitive solution.