I wrote a list of great books on motherhood for Shepherd, a web site that aims to bring a human touch to online book discovery.

From Shepherd’s founder: “I love wandering around bookstores and letting random books capture my attention. Nothing will ever replace the ‘bookstore experience,’ but I want to reimagine online book discovery with more serendipity and delight. To start, I've asked 11,000+ authors to share five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood and why they love each book. This infuses each book with magic and meaning.”

I write, “Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.” Read my list of smart and artful books about motherhood here.