New (to me)

An online journal and some blogs that I've come across this month:

The Summerset Review: this online journal has been around since 2002, and the current issue features a story ("Off the Map," by Jon Morgan Davies) that's told almost entirely in flash-forward, speeding through the consequences of teenage love.

Raintaxi features book reviews and essays.  The winter issue (online) includes an interview with stellar nonfiction writer/naturalist Terry Tempest Williams.

MotherReader ("the heart of a mother; the soul of a reader; the mouth of a smartass") comes from a children's library assistant who's also mom to two school-age girls.  She seems to be blogging anonymously.  Lots of reading recommendations for kids' books, plus she's funny.  She devotes a recent entry to Festivus, airing her grievances.

And What Women Write, a rotating blog from a group of writers in various stages of their careers, mostly fiction, it looks like.   Short essay-like posts, and interviews with writers and agents.

A slightly different best books list

The Guardian (UK) has come up with a best-books-of-the-decade list.  Fifty books, including entries from writers highlight some of the books (Julian Barnes on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Lorrie Moore on Obama's writing).  Interesting mix of British and American titles, with a handful of other nationalities, and a mix of fiction and non-, and high and low.

Writers claiming the bad-mother mantle

Sandra Tsing Loh's recent piece in The Atlantic is another of her long, personal-essayish reviews, this time focusing on Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother.   

I enjoy her writing -- she's funny and vivid -- though sometimes Tsing Loh tries to turn her personal experience into dubious trends (as in an essay from last summer, when she suggested that leaving her husband because she fell in love with someone else indicated something larger, culture-wise). 

In this latest piece, Tsing Loh first puts herself into the bad-mother camp, and along the way she lets us know that she thinks Ayelet Waldman isn't much of bad mother.  Not too surprising. What's surprising is how Tsing Loh describes the year that her own sister-in-law dropped to the floor and fell into a coma.  Tsing Loh and her two little girls went to live with her brother, to help out with child- and house-care.   How Tsing Loh mothered during that time, how she managed to get all the kids to enjoy visiting the comatose sister-in-law, is really wonderful. She outs herself as a stellar, though reluctant, mother, and reminds us that it all could be so much worse.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of blog chatter out there, like this one from a Politics Daily blogger: Bad Mothers? What Are We Talking About?