Crib Notes: The 5th Birthday Issue 💕🎉

Celebrating 5 whole years of writing about reading & mothering! Featuring 5 absolutely banging books.

Five years ago, on December 19th 2019, I sent out the first ever Crib Notes newsletter.

This is what I wrote:

‘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 has brought an onslaught of visceral new emotions, and these have 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.’ — Crib Notes, December 2019

In the first Crib Notes, I recommended six books for new and knackered mothers with thoughts on how and when to read them. Sprinkling my reviews with my own experiences of early motherhood, I described listening to audiobooks as I lapped the park with the pram, and novels that kept…