A Year in Reading: Namrata Poddar
When I got pregnant in 2018, I received my share of platitudes and breezy advice reserved for new mothers-to-be: Amazon Prime (fuck social justice, think survival, mama!); a bottle of wine at an arm’s length, always; try not to do it all; tell your spouse what you need—men need to be told; do not force potty training; take a break from work postpartum—you should be working to live, not living to work! No one though, not even my writer friends, told me how new and early motherhood would reduce my weekly work hours by half, without necessarily reducing the weekly workload.
Now that I’ve wrapped up a third year of parenting, there is no denying that motherhood has been the most demanding and fulfilling experience of my life. That said, every time nostalgia about a pre-kid life takes over, I pine for the lush reading life I once took for granted—a nook where I could get quiet with a book for hours at a stretch, discover new worlds, the non-Columbus way, and receive ideas from ether because reading forces you into a certain stillness. These days, my reading life is sparse—an hour a day on an average, beyond “screen
