The Hare with Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal

I bought this thinking it was fiction, but after a slow start it turned out to be something far more intriguing. Ostensibly a history of the author's family's ownership of a collection of netsuke (miniature Japanese sculptures), it covers a wide range of cultural and social history through the eyes of this wealthy cosmopolitan family of Jewish bankers, within the context of the author's thoughtful reflections on his own research and writing, and the impact that the project has on him. Early sections on art collecting in 19th century Paris were of limited interest to me, but the description of life for a prominent Jewish family in Nazi Vienna was compelling. I was impressed by de Waal's avoidance of sentimentality - after telling the quite amazing story of the netsuke's survival, hidden in a mattress by a loyal family servant, he describes this as an 'affront' in the light of the many people connected with the family who were not so lucky. One phrase stuck in my mind particularly clearly: writing of his grandmother's decision to burn her old correspondence and not speak of those times, he says, "Losing things can sometimes give you a space in which to live."

Simplicity Parenting - Kim John Payne

This is a book about "using the extraordinary power of less to raise calmer, happier, and more secure kids". Another ghostwritten one, this presents the ideas of a counsellor, inspired by the principles of Waldorf education, who asserts that by moving away from the current emphasis on "too much stuff, too many choices, too much information, and too fast", we can reduce our children's stress levels, providing increased calm and security, and align our family lives more closely with our original vision for them. He presents an action plan based around four levels of simplification: of the environment, rhythm, schedules, and filtering out the adult world.

As a tangible, 'doable', place to start, the environment is the first point addressed. The main recommendation is to remove the vast majority of the toys that have accumulated (halving, then halving again, and possibly even once more, although the later stages will be stored to build a 'toy library' for periodic swapping out), focusing on rejecting fixed, complex, technological toys and retaining open-ended ones that support creative, imaginative, purposeful play. (For more on this see the work of Simon Nicholson on 'loose parts'.) I have trouble accepting the application of the same principle to books, but I do wholeheartedly agree that my life would be simpler and more harmonious if my daughter's wardrobe contained only clothes that fit her and suited the current weather! The corrosive effects of advertising are also discussed, with credit given to Mary Pipher's book The Shelter of Each Other, making the point that marketing teaches us to be unhappy with what we have, creating "both a sense of entitlement, and a false reliance on purchases rather than people to satisfy and sustain us emotionally".

The next section focuses on using 'rhythm', i.e. consistency, predictability, and shared rituals, to build calm, security, and a sense of connection into family life. I'm not sure I'd go as far as adopting the idea of 'core meals' tied to each night of the week, but I did like some of his suggestions: a time each night to preview the next day; family meals where all are involved in the preparation and cleanup; a moment of silence before eating and an opportunity to share 'favourite things' about the day or each other; building in 'pressure valves' each day of calm, connected moments or absorbing activities; candlelight; predictable bedtimes etc. I particularly liked the idea of easing transitions by assigning a chore before leaving the house to break the flow of play before trying to get out of the door.

The discussion on schedules uses a farming analogy based on crop rotation to emphasize the importance of 'fallow periods' (leisure and rest; 'downtime') and replenishing 'cover crops' (creativity or deep play, opportunities to fully lose yourself in an activity) as well as the main 'crop' of the daily activities of school, classes, sports, chores and socialising, which can easily be 'overscheduled' in contemporary life. This includes a useful reminder to think ahead and plan to balance active and calm times (including 'Sabbath moments' of distraction-free quiet family time), and I was particularly interested in the idea of boredom as a 'gift', which can be "appreciated for how often it precedes inspiration". He even asserts that overscheduling can "create a reliance on outer stimulation, a culture of compulsion and instant gratification", sowing the seeds of addiction...

The final section, on filtering out the pressures and concerns of the adult world, has a twin focus - on adult media and information, and on parental overinvolvement. Earlier in the book, he quotes US journalist Ellen Goodman: "The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears", and here he focuses on trust, and repeats that "parents need to relax in order to convey ease to their children": "we need to live with confidence, to parent with a sense of strength and openness, and perhaps most of all, a sense of humour". Obviously one of the main focuses of this section is on 'screens', in particular TV - I can see the logic of removing the TV completely, but I am more comfortable with his lesser option of reducing its influence by setting limits on the quantity and content of its use, and taking occasional longer 'breaks' from it. I also liked the reminder that adults too can benefit from cutting down on our exposure to sensationalist and alarmist media. In discussing 'helicopter parenting' and 'hyperparenting' he suggests that such overinvolvement can be countered by an effort to 'talk less', removing references to adult topics or concerns, cutting down on running commentaries, and trying only to say what is 'true, kind, and necessary'. "In a noisy world, quiet attentiveness speaks louder than words, and it gives a child more space for their own thoughts and feelings to develop." I was surprised and intrigued by his advice on avoiding too much analysis of feelings with younger children - "when we push a young child toward an awareness they don't yet have, we transpose our own emotions, and our own voice, on theirs".

Overall I found this to be a positive and encouraging book, putting into words some of the vague feelings I'd been having recently about wanting to provide a calmer, clearer space for our family with more room for creativity and self-expression, and suggesting practical steps to make that happen. I liked the final idea to help parents appreciate the ordinary, everyday, miraculous present lives of their children: "before falling into sleep, remember the ordinary moments of the day, the moments with your children that meant something to you".

Your Self-Confident Baby - Magda Gerber

I came to this through being given a recommendation for an article on Janet Lansbury's blog, and after exploring the site further and becoming quite captivated by this video in which a baby demonstrates amazing persistence and concentration in reaching for a toy without adult assistance, I decided to find out more about the "RIE" philosophy that was being illustrated.

The book is a (ghost-written) summary of the teachings of Magda Gerber, who brought the ideas of the Hungarian paediatrician Emmi Pikler to the US & founded "Resources for Infant Educarers" to demonstrate and spread these ideas. She advocates an approach to childcare based on respect, listing her basic principles as:

• Basic trust in the child to be an initiator, an explorer, and a self-learner
• An environment for the child that is physically safe, cognitively challenging, and emotionally nurturing
• Time for uninterrupted play
• Freedom to explore and interact with other infants
• Involvement of the child in all care-giving activities to allow that child to become an active participant rather than a passive recipient
• Sensitive observation of the child in order to understand her needs
• Consistency and clearly defined limits and expectations to develop discipline

Much of what is described here makes a lot of sense - I can see how the more "hands-off" approach to children playing (described here as "absence of interference") could support the growth of independence and confidence, and I have already been seeing positive results with my own toddler from trying to "help" her less when she is playing (e.g. when she asked me to make a person out of playdough as she didn't think she could, I handed it back to her and she did eventually make one herself and seemed pleased with the results). I'm sure I could also benefit from reducing the number of over-engineered plastic toys in my home and replacing them with a few simpler, open-ended objects. I also agree with the emphasis on calm observation and honest communication rather than overstimulation and distraction - a comment on "invasive" tickling bringing on "hysterical" laughter struck a particular chord with me as I've never felt entirely comfortable with this as a distraction technique.

Some of the ideas presented here don't sit quite so comfortably with me, however. For example, Gerber is not keen on supporting infants in positions they couldn't get into themselves. I'm not sure how much of this was learned in response to my actions, but my daughter was insistent on being held in an upright, outward-facing position as a baby, and I wouldn't have wanted to deny her this. Gerber also rejects anything that restrains infants; I enjoyed using a sling with my daughter and hope to again with my son, and I would have trouble giving up the idea of that closeness. Similarly, she advocates feeding on your lap and moving onto using a small chair and table rather than a highchair for meals - I can see the logic of this based on her philosophy, but I can't imagine giving up the convenience of a highchair or the social time of sitting at an adult table together. Most significantly, although I can see theoretical benefits in terms of building independence and the ability to self-soothe, I can't entirely accept her recommendations on allowing infants to cry, particularly in terms of following the "Ferber method" at bedtime.

I did find her views on not stepping in too early to try to resolve disputes between toddlers very interesting, though - she says, "I believe in letting children struggle over a toy as long as neither one gets hurt or hasn't reached a point where he is past his limit of coping with the situation." I can see how this might lead to more genuine learning about social interaction, problem solving, and co-operation, but it also seems like a tricky strategy to implement, particularly in the context of adult social expectations that parents are responsible for their children's actions and should enforce "fair play"! I'm quite ambivalent about her views on "teaching" toddlers - she feels strongly that "learning academic skills should be saved for school-age children" and although I can see her point that pushing a reluctant child could quash their innate love of learning, and I do feel uncomfortable with pressure such as repeatedly correcting toddlers' speech, I think that there is room for a middle ground where a child's own enthusiasm could help them to acquire skills that may smooth their future path in life...

Overall, this book has given me plenty of food for thought and I think that it will have an influence on the way I parent in future. I don't feel able to adopt her philosophy wholesale, as I still expect to do more carrying and comforting than she would endorse, but I will certainly be on the lookout for ways to back off a little during "play" times and during social interactions.

The Birth of Love - Joanna Kavenna

An absorbing and thought-provoking book dealing with the subject of birth and nonconformity from several different angles: a nineteenth-century physician whose campaign against puerperal fever set him so at odds with the medical mainstream that he ended up in a lunatic asylum; a novelist struggling with the social demands of promoting his book; a mother going through the terrifying beauty of the birth - the gory sundering"; and a prisoner being punished for her belief in family relationships and motherhood in a dystopian future where "it is necessary for the survival of the species that we regulate procreation". My timing was a little off on this one - while pregnant for the second time it was unnerving to read about women dying due to doctors failing to wash their hands after autopsies, and then a detailed account of a second birth that is worse than the first... Despite this, there are moments of warmth and positivity in the book, and the concluding paragraphs, describing the initial reactions of the new parents on meeting their baby daughter, are powerfully uplifting.

The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas

Although complex and engrossing, this initially struck me as a disappointing missed opportunity of a book. The main premise is timely and interesting, but the characters through which it is explored came across as unsympathetic stereotypical extremes, almost caricatures. I also found the writing style alienating - the male characters all seemed to see the world through a filter of sexual desire and barely-controlled violence, and casual racism & infidelity seemed to be the norm. I almost abandoned it part-way through, but it did improve after the first few chapters. Gradually-revealed back-stories added depth and complexity to some of the characters when it was their turn to speak (e.g. the smothering mother who blanked out all negative thoughts in her attempt to cancel out her own past and her initial inability to bond with the baby), and the later sections told from the point of view of the two teenagers were a little more appealing and hopeful. The author also displayed real skill and insight in the portrayal of the ambivalence of close relationships through the moment-by-moment reversals and fleeting contradictory beliefs in the interior monologues.

Girl Reading - Katie Ward

A collection of vivid short stories on the theme of images of women reading. One of the cover review quotes compared this to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and it is indeed another impressionistic journey through time, made up of diverse stories told from very diverse viewpoints. In both books, each story is individually powerful, but they are enhanced by the many subtle echoes creating resonances between the tales.
The two stories that had the greatest impact for me were both about relationships between women: one about an 18th century lady mourning her lover and the completion of her posthumous portrait, and the other in which a pair of 19th century twins meet after a long period apart following the breakup of their partnership as celebrity mediums.
The only one that lost me slightly at the time, although strangely it seems to have grown on me in memory, was one set in a dystopian future characterised by almost total virtualisation and disengagement from direct experience. In a flirtation with meta narrative that seemed a little out of keeping with the naturalistic tone of the rest of the book, this story features a 'Sibil' that allows people to engage with a series of artworks via an immersive experience that conveys the (or at least, 'a') story behind the image. I thoroughly enjoyed this book but this last story did make me uncomfortably aware that I had not seen any of the images that inspired it...

The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood

A tale of a dysfunctional future society and post-apocalyptic survival (or otherwise?) that celebrates and gently mocks the extreme environmentalist religion whose members are among the few with the skills and resources to endure after the "flood" of illness that wipes out most of the population. Closely entwined with her previous novel Oryx and Crake, this features several of the same characters and institutions and is set during roughly the same period of time. I enjoyed it, although it is pretty violent in places and some of her ideas of the future are rather disturbing, particularly in the light of her comment in the acknowledgements section that the novel "is fiction, but the general tendencies and many of the details in it are alarmingly close to fact".

The Long Song - Andrea Levy

In a fascinating 'writing of' section, the author explains that her intention in writing this book was to explore slavery as "a massive social system - a society in the true sense - that endured for three hundred years". In emphasising the "guile and humour" needed to survive, she creates realistic - strong yet flawed - characters, and succeeds in her aim of portraying slaves as more than "simply a mass of wretched voiceless victims"". This focus on complexities and contradictions is also applied to the white reformers, particularly the newly-arrived Englishman who is unapologetically delighted with his cleverness when he tells the slave July of his plan to marry the white mistress so that they can be together, and whose ideals give way to anger and cruelty when he fails in his attempts to persuade the freed slaves to work the same long hours as before. Most poignant for me was the way in which slave children were treated as property, with the casual removal of the child July from her mother to be a house servant echoed later in the way July's own child was taken away to England, and particularly the surprise and disbelief with which July's attachment to the master's child was met: "But what, Miss July, did you wan' keep that little pickney for your own?" The description of dances arranged so that coloured women could meet white men in the hope of "raising the colour" of their children was horribly plausible, both in the fine graduations of status from 'mulatto' to 'mustiphino', and in the demeaning entrance examination where lips, nose, hair and skin were assessed for negro characteristics. Finally, in keeping with this novel's refusal to tell a simple story, the desperate harshness of post-emancipation survival is also described. Despite the sometimes dark subject matter, this is an engaging and enjoyable book, with an often playful tone.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God - Rebecca Goldstein

This was one of those happy library finds that made me want to run out and buy the author's entire back-catalogue (or possibly just hide under the duvet and sulk because I'll never be as clever as she is). The very likeable hero Cass is uncertainly enjoying his new-found fame and success after publishing a best-selling psychology book in which he demolishes the '36 arguments' of the title while asserting that 'theistic propositions' like 'God exists' are confusing and irrelevant metaphors for the attitudes and emotions which form the true basis of religion: "what it feels like to hold a spiritual attitude to the world and live accordingly". A lively debate on this topic forms the climax to an entertaining story in which Cass is pitted against a range of characters ranging from the hyper-rational but heartless Lucinda, who believes that "most of what matters in life is a zero-sum game", to the increasingly delusional Professor Klapper, who considers Cass a Judas because he refused to write a dissertation on the Qabalistic significance of the potato kugel. For most of the novel I felt that the balance between the irrational and rational characters was not quite being held, as Klapper seemed by far the most ridiculous and destructive figure in the book, but the poignant heroism of the young Valdener Rabbi who gives up his potential future as a mathematical prodigy to return to his community is described with such warmth that I changed my mind on this at the novel's conclusion. As an entertaining bonus, 'Cass's' appendix containing the 36 arguments and their refutations is included in full as an appendix to the novel.

Advice for Strays - Justine Kilkerr

This powerful story initially presents itself as a rather charming fantasy about the return in adulthood of a young girl's unusual imaginary friend - a lion - but soon turns into something rather darker. As it gradually emerges that the child had reasons to need such a protector, the question begins to be raised - at what point does a necessary coping mechanism become unhelpful and destructive? The book manages to maintain psychological realism while dealing with wildly unrealistic content, as the lion's actions become harder to restrain, and is genuinely disturbing in places (how troubled do you have to be for your own imaginary friend to decide you are "asking for it"?), but manages to remain an enjoyable read for the most part. I loved the ending, as the gradual disconnection was described from both points of view, with the lion losing his memory as he fades away, and the girl waiting for him to return while deep down knowing that she needs him not to.

The Coward's Tale - Vanessa Gebbie

The clever narrative structure of this gentle collection of stories about a Welsh community's secrets in the aftermath of a mining disaster pulls the reader along - like the newly-arrived small boy who listens entranced to the old beggar's lyrical tales about the mysterious behaviour of the town's inhabitants, we find ourselves wondering what is truth, what is myth, and perhaps also how much it matters. An intriguing and engaging book with a surprisingly uplifting ending.