HALF BAKED

I can never resist books based on the blogs I follow. If you haven’t read Flotsam, I recommend doing so, but even if you’re not a blog fan, this memoir is worth checking out. Alexa Stevenson’s story (subtitled The Story of My Nerves, My Newborn, and How We Both Learned to Breathe) is amazing and her sense of humor irresistible—plus, she’s from Minnesota! Books about childbearing aren’t my number-one interest, but as a fellow worrier, I loved how Stevenson framed her tale as a meditation on anxiety, and I did a lot of head-nodding over passages like this one:

The mistake I made—and would keep making, over and over—was in believing that my apprehension had a protective quality; that preparing for the worst would arm me against misfortune. Regrettably, the disaster you expect is seldom the one visited upon you.