Two interesting books

Parenting Inc by Pamela Paul, seems an interesting read on hyper ventilating parents and the toys they think their children have to have.

Paul says she talked to parents, but I would have liked to hear more of their voices and less from the news stories and experts she quotes extensively. My guess is that most parents would share my panic in the face of Buy Buy Baby and then discover, as I did, that even the product that friends insist you must have is actually an encumbrance (and that all your lovingly selected toys pale when the kid discovers he can pull the saucepans out of the cupboard).

Most of us feel the pangs and then figure out some happy medium. We hyperventilate, we overbuy, and then we get a talking-to by a friend, a mother or a pediatrician (like the one who told me after we’d spent hundreds of dollars on a changing table that the only place to change the baby was on the floor), and we self-correct. Paul herself seems to come to this conclusion as she describes working out her son’s feeding woes. She even finds some good in the parenting industry: Web sites have put experts and blogging parents at our fingertips, and make it “a snap” to buy toys from abroad or the latest baby gear from Amsterdam, Sweden and New Zealand.

I, sanctimommy, raise an eyebrow at that carbon footprint. But then, Paul frowns on my Stokke highchair. So see? Not all models look the same, but in the end, we each figure out a way to, yes, trust ourselves.



Jhumpa Lahiri's new book Unaccustomed Earth got a very positive review in the NYT. I am looking forward to reading it very soon.

Except for their names, “Hema and Kaushik” could evoke any American’s ’70s childhood, any American’s bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the waves of admiration, competition and criticism that flow between the two families could occur between Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight for connection and control between Hema and Kaushik — as children and as adults — replays the tussle that has gone on ever since men and women lived in caves.

Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.