Another Book about Preemies

A month ago, I reviewed the books Extreme Prematurity and Fragile Beginnings here.  I recently read Half Baked: The Story of My Nerves, My Newborn, and How We Both Learned to Breathe by Alexa Stevenson, which is, among other things, a memoir about parenting a preemie.  I enjoyed this book, and if you like well-written medical memoirs, or you have smart, cynical friend who just had a preemie (and would not want you to buy her a novelty teddy bear hugging a heart at the hospital gift shop), you should check out this book.  If you just had a preemie, you might want to put this one aside and come back to it in a few months or a year.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the style of blogs to books.  I read blogs and enjoy the way bloggers write, but I often find that when I read a book I expect something different.  The breezy blog style doesn't always hold up and I often wish for more substantive chapters.  While I felt this way about parts of Half Baked, overall I felt that she managed the blog to book transition very gracefully. Alexa is still blogging here.

There were some experiences that she describes in the book the book that I recognized from my own experience with LB, particularly the brief period of post-baby euphoria, and an overall more relaxed approach to parenting post-preemie.

This book is the first I have read for pleasure as an e-book (on a computer, not on an e-reader) and the experience sucked.  I kept getting timed out, having to log back in, and waiting for the book to buffer. All that added to the fact that it is pretty much impossible to go back to a specific passage (in an e-book or a book on an e-reader), left me very annoyed.  I really hope the tech geniuses out there can fix some of the e-book design flaws before physical books disappear from the earth.  And don't even get me started on the Kindle, which clearly has its uses, but could only be considered a device of technical wizardry if we all went back in time and it was 1985.