Inspirations

Cookbooks

• Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. I impulsively ordered this book within seconds of stumbling across a review, and I haven't been sorry. Fresh, hot artisan bread has become a standard part of my dinner repertoire. This stuff is so good; I think it easily rivals the bread you get in a good restaurant.

Kid Stuff

• Here Come the 123s and Here Come the ABCs CD/DVD sets by They Might Be Giants. Jack loves these DVDs and so do his parents. The tunes are more than tolerable for big people, and some of the animation is really lovely.

Memoirs & Personal Essays

• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert — my favorite book of last year
• The Kid: What Happened When My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant by Dan Savage; Glen and I love all of Dan's books and his weekly Savage Love Podcast sex advice column is great fun to listen to in the car when the kids aren't around.
• Life As We Know It: A Collection of Personal Essays from Salon.com — I adored this book, and would love to write an essay this real myself some day. That's it; I'm getting my copy back out and reading it again.

Parenting

• The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel — my friend Kelly recommended this one; I'm about halfway through it, and so far it's the best parenting book I've come across

• The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night by Elizabeth Pantley and William Sears — This book helped me so much in Jack's first year.

Spirituality & Personal Growth

• Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks — A couple great takeaways for me from this book were to try to be 100 percent present and honest in all of my relationships, and to give myself permission to learn my life lesson's gently.
• The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz — This quick, easy read contains four simple (but not always easy) pieces of advice that I often use as personal mantras: 1) Be impeccable with your word. 2) Don't take anything personally. 3) Don't make assumptions. 4) Always do your best. Disclaimer: This book starts out with this stuff that will be a little woo-woo voodoo for some of you, but get past that and the agreements themselves are really no-nonsense, straightfoward, life-changing advice.

Writing & Creativity

• The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott — one of my favorite authors; I love all of her books

More Good Ones

• Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy — I've had this since college, one of those books with a torn cover and dog-eared pages and lots of highlighting and circling of favorite passages
• Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton — I listened to this inspirational book on CD over the course of a couple long drives and it inspired me to dig a little deeper and increase our family's monthly giving.

Comments

[kelly]

breaking clean and anything (meaning any of her books) by alice munro. breaking clean is one of my top books - top five i'd say. and alice munro is sublime. also all over but the shouting and ava's man by rick bragg, another two in my top ten. if you want serious, the three-part series by taylor branch on the civil rights struggle is amazing. and the noonday demon (a book about depression) was life changing.

[Missy Keenan]

Thanks Kelly -- I'll look into those!