Autobiographies written by people aged less than about 80 years old have never really appealed. Anyone much younger than that just doesn’t have the live experience to make for compelling reading, surely?

I was to be proved wrong in that assumption when I was sent Jo Whiley’s autobiography “My World in Motion” to review.

Jo Whiley is a successful Radio 1 DJ who has built her reputation on discovering and promoting the ‘next big thing’ in music. She is a regular co-presenter for the Glastonbury Festival coverage and has a morning show from 10am every weekday.

The first impression of the book is one of overwhelming enthusiasm, spirit and personality. It’s packed full of interesting and often hilarious anecdotes about the music industry and life in the BBC, combined with the balancing act of being part of the Whiley-Morton ‘tribe’. It’s a non-stop ride and as a result the narrative can feel a little disjointed in places, but Jo comes across as someone who is honest, loving and living life with every last ounce of energy that she has.

I greatly enjoyed reading about her family, her childhood with her sister Frances who suffers from cri du chat, and how she juggles her life as a DJ with bringing up four children. Motherhood, work and life balance is hard for many women and while Jo doesn’t claim to have found that balance, she meets the challenge head-on with the passion and vivacity that she throws into every aspect of her life. It makes a refreshing change from the current trend of angst-ridden genre of momoirs.

The absolute best feature of the book, though, is the playlists that are scattered throughout the pages, each themed to a different stage of her life. It was a great trip through memory lane for me as well as I re-discovered tracks I haven’t listened to in years and I strongly suspect I’m going to be spending a lot more on iTunes over the next few weeks as I go back through the book!

Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend this book to any music fan or if you just love to read about other people’s interesting lives. Jo Whiley’s “My World in Motion” is published today by Virgin Books and you can find out more by visiting the My World in Motion website.

I’ve been kindly sent a copy of the parenting memoir Instructions Not Included to review. With a huge backlog of podcasts to listen to recently, it’s been a while since I’ve picked up a real live book, so it’s been a real luxury to have the excuse to put my feet up and read in the afternoons before school pick-up time.

The book is a light-hearted chronicle of a mother’s journey from a high-flying career (almost literally, she used to work for British Airways – admittedly in an office at Heathrow rather than 30,000 feet above ground) to the chaos of being a stay-at-home mother to three boys. The author may already be familiar to some, Charlotte Moerman is the Buggy Blogger over at Raising Kids. She’s a funny writer with a sharp wit – a great many of her observations are spot on. It’s a little UK-centric at times (cultural asides to things like certain Cbeebies presenters from a few years ago, for example) so if your children aren’t in the golden age-group then you may not recognise some of the references, but generally it has a warm ‘in the Mummy club’ feeling to it.

However, I did find the non-linear time line of the book to be a major barrier to my enjoyment of it. It jumped around alarmingly frequently, often with no discernible link to the previous scene. To me this felt disjointed and confusing, breaking up the reading flow to no real purpose and robbing it of a clear beginning/middle/end structure – I ran out of book rather than reached a satisfying conclusion. This may be a side effect of being a “book of a blog” – becoming a collection of anecdotes stuck together – however, having never followed her blog, I can’t be certain that this is the case.

To an extent, I realise that I’m not the ideal target market for this genre. With both my sons in full time education now and the fragile beginnings of getting a life back of my own, I’ve outgrown that slightly child-obsessive stage at the front-lines of early motherhood – a pre-requisite for the whole (now rather saturated) parenting memoir scene.

However, mothers who are at home with toddlers or pre-schoolers will recognise a lot of themselves in this book, and as this time of life doesn’t usually leave much time for extended reading periods, the fragmented nature of the narrative could actually be a bonus.

In preparation for our camping trips this year, I’ve been buying one or two children’s audiobooks on Audible to keep the boys entertained during the car journeys. I’ve been really impressed with Audible, they have a great collection, are reasonably priced and really simple to use – just buy, download and they automatically go into iTunes into a nice Audiobooks library folder. The iPod then downloads it when you sync and away you go.

However, we’ve also been given a couple of free audiobook CDs plus I have some other ones that the kids have been given as birthday presents. It would be lovely to have them on the iPod too rather than having to faff with remembering to take the CDs and swapping them around during the journey. However, when you rip them into iTunes, you end up with lots of little track files of about 3 minutes long and they just end up in the Music folder not the Audiobooks library, which then get shuffled out of order (as that’s the way I have my music set up to sync to my iPod).

After a little research, though, I have managed to find a way to get them as one big track into the Audiobooks folder and make them bookmarkable (i.e. when you stop half way through, it remembers where you got to, even if you listen to something else in between). Here’s how you do it.

1. If you are a Mac user, download and install (following the instructions on the site) the Make Bookmarkable script from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. It’s really quick, hassle free and doesn’t mess anything up.
2. Put the CD in with iTunes open. Click ‘No’ when it asks you if you want to import.
3. Select all the tracks on the CD with your mouse (shift left-click) then go to Advanced>Join CD Tracks. This will make it into one big track instead of lots of teeny tiny tracks. Now you can click ‘Import CD’ at the bottom right of iTunes.
4. One the CD has been fully imported, you need to find it in your music library. Search for it so its the only track showing. Check that you have the ‘Kind’ column showing in the display (if not, right click on the grey bar with the column headings and check ‘Kind’).
5. If the ‘Kind’ is already an AAC audio file you can skip this step, otherwise, select the track with your mouse and go to Advanced>Convert Selection to AAC. This may take a while, but when it’s done delete the old MP3 track leaving only the new AAC audio file remaining.
6. You may notice that the title and artist fields are a bit messed up. Time to fix that. Right click on the track and select Get Info. Go to the Info tab and amend the name and artist as appropriate. If there are multiple CDs I like to put a “Part 1″ or “Part 2″ etc at the end of the title. I also tend to put the book author in the “Artist” field and the book narrator in the “Composer” field. Change the Genre to “Audiobook”. In the ‘Options’ tab make sure to check ‘Remember playback position’ and ‘Skip when shuffling’. If you want a nice little picture to show up for the icon, go to the “Artwork” tab and upload a scan of the CD cover (or use any other picture you feel is appropriate). Click OK when you’re done
7. Last step now, I promise! Mac Users: see the little curly script icon between the ‘Window’ and ‘Help’ menus? Click on that with the file selected and use ‘Make Bookmarkable’ – that’s the script you installed in step 1. Click ‘Proceed’ and then ‘Thanks’ when it’s finished. Don’t panic when the file disappears – it’s been moved! Click on Audiobooks library and you will see your Audiobook file in all its glory! Windows Users: you will need to close iTunes, then find the file in your “My Music” directory and change the file extension to “.m4b” this should hopefully do the same thing. Job done!

Now, that may look a little long winded but it’s much quicker than it looks. Once you’ve installed the script in step 1 you only need to use steps 2-7 for any other audiobook CD you have and it makes listening to them on your iPod a whole lot easier.

Warning, the podcast I am about to review may seriously affect your bank balance…

I don’t know what it is about Simon Mayo, but he is probably one of THE best presenters on British radio. He is funny without forcing it, offers intelligent conversation without dominating it and is a very skilled interviewer. The Book Panel podcast (originally broadcast on BBC Radio’s 5 Live) is probably one of his best shows.

The format is usually set around the review of two books (announced in the previous week’s show) with a panel of reviewers, the two authors in question and a phone-in review from a listener. The team seem to gel well and the quality of discussion (as you would expect) is in depth and excellent covering everything from what the book cover looks like to character dissection and background information.

The book genres and topics are varied and well chosen – since I’ve been listening, they’ve reviewed children’s books, graphic novels, true life accounts, historical fiction… there’s something there for everyone, and quite often even those you didn’t expect to be interesting make for gripping listening.

The only disadvantage is… every single book they review I end up desperately wanting to read. It could become a rather expensive free podcast for me…

I’ll be straight with you. When I was first asked to participate in Mama Lama Ding Dong’s UK Virtual Book Tour, I wasn’t totally convinced.

For a start, I don’t do parenting memoirs – I enjoy keeping up with internet friends’ parenting experiences via their blogs, but that’s a far more interactive affair. If I actually get time to read a book, I’m looking for escapism – the last thing on my reading list is something which relives my normal every day life with two small children.

Secondly, what on EARTH would I (a routine-loving, organised, fairly conventional Brit living in an obscure and fairly average English town) have in common with Ayun Halliday (zany, spur-of-the-moment, bohemian attachment parent living in the heart of Manhattan)? What if I hated the book and couldn’t force myself to read beyond the first chapter?

What persuaded me to participate though, was Ayun’s insistence that I could completely slate the book if I so wished. Now that sounded like fun.

Actually, it turns out that we have a fair bit in common after all. We both have two children aged almost exactly 3 years apart (a bit of a weak link, I know, but I appreciated it all the same), we both passionately adored breastfeeding, we’re both city lovers (only I get to regret having moved away from my city), and we both reacted to the stifling tedium of being at home with small children by writing (I have my blog, she has her zine – the East Village Inky, a sort of low-tech blog with artistic doodlings and longer deadlines). She also isn’t afraid of appropriate swearing for emphasis and has a tendancy to plunge into far too much gruesome detail because, damnit, it’s funnier to watch you squirm.

I love this woman.

It also turns out that I love this book. Could hardly put it down in fact, which completely wrecked my plans to trash it. I spent most of my evenings sniggering incontrollably and annoying Akra by reading the choice bits out; the choice bits being whole chapters at a time. At the risk of using up all my adjectives in one go, I would say Mama Lama Ding Dong is light-hearted, vibrant and verging on the knicker-wettingly funny. Even during the serious bits.

Even though the language hasn’t been “translated” from US English, the humour travels well across the pond, being self-depreciating and brutally honest. (By the way, for my US readers, the book is being sold under its original title of The Big Rumpus over there. WHY they didn’t call it The Big Rumpus over here, I have no idea, but there you go) This is Ayun Halliday warts and all, during her triumphs and her less successful ventures. She’s a real live human being and not selling us the Super Mother dream or showing us up too much in our own failings. And, despite her irreverant flippancy, this isn’t someone whose life has always gone smoothly. Her chapters describing life in the NICU with her daughter, Inky, are particularly poignant and vivid. While she’s still laughing, it’s laughter through tears.

I asked Ayun about her experiences in the NICU, and if there was any advice she could provide to new parents who find themselves there:

The NICU was like this bizarre little cocoon, a not-quite-parallel universe I had no idea existed until I desperately required its services. Very few of my friends and acquaintances had had children when Inky was born, and apparently, all their babies came out right as rain, because I’d never heard tell of any instances where the baby didn’t come home with the mother or extreme procedures: CAT scans, high contrast MRIs, the ol’ Space Monkey IV in the top of the head. Now that I know lots of people with kids, I realize that the NICU is hardly an uncommon experience, but still, it’s exceptional enough to knock just about everyone who winds up in there for a big emotional loop. That’s true even if the only thing wrong with your baby is an easily addressed case of jaundice (strip em to their diapers, strap on a tiny pair of felt eye shades and throw ‘em under a sun lamp, where they bask like 1940′s movie stars).

I’m going to tailor my advice for families who wind up in the NICU, because that’s the only hospital experience I have. I had an extensive hospital stay when I contracted listeria while pregnant with Milo (read all about it in my most recent book, Dirty Sugar Cookies), but he came out healthy, emerging underwater in a free standing birthing center, a few weeks after I was discharged from the hospital. They let us go home after a few hours. It was glorious. I must admit to some feelings of gratitude that that happy, hippie dippie birthing experience was my second, and not my first. I’m sure I would have been insufferable if everything had gone so smoothly on the first go round, certain that anyone who encountered difficulties in labor was just not as open to the experience as I! Live and learn.

So, here’s my advice for parents, particularly first time parents, who find themselves in the NICU:

1. If your baby looks like he or she is shaping up to be a non-short-term guest, Mama needs to move on in. This won’t be an issue if Baby gave Mama a vaginal hematoma on the way out and additionally one of the stitches from Mama’s episiotomy has become infected – if that’s the case, they’ll hang onto your ass in the maternity ward for five whole days. (Tell your friends to bring you a couple of picnic baskets’ worth of good food and look out for that intern with the bottle of hydrogen peroxide!) But if the hospital gives you your walking papers while Baby’s still in the Big House, you need to infiltrate that NICU 24-7. I was permitted to stay in an isolation room, with the caveat that I’d get the boot if the room was needed for its stated purpose– I spent a lot of time wondering about babies with contagious diseases, though I think that room is also used for families whose baby’s death is imminent, to offer them such privacy as is available. Fortunately for all involved, there was no need more pressing than mine. Once when I mentioned how grateful I was to be able to stay, a nurse remarked that this option should be available to all nursing mothers. Not every baby in the NICU will be permitted or able to nurse, but even so, it’s still your right to advocate for the right to stay. Ask your partner or whoever else may have attended the birth to argue on your behalf, too. He or she might be able to present a more coherent, less histrionic case (I’m assuming that nothing traumatic has happened to Partner’s genitals in the last 24 hours.) Hopefully the staff will be happy to accommodate you, but don’t let yourself shrink like a spider on a hot skillet if they’re not. Tell them you’ll sleep in a chair beside your baby’s bassinet. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to act like a mouse-shaped doormat when your kid’s of school age, so act like a lion now…
2. …a lion who remembers to say “please” and “thank you”. Nurses get it on both ends. (There, Pewari, that ought to increase site traffic from male Internet users in the 14 – 30 year old age bracket!) What I mean is, from everything I’ve observed and heard, nurses are overworked, underpaid, and responsible for performing an unending cycle of unsavory but essential chores. You’re in something that feels like hell, but that hell would be a lot worse without all these good helpers. One thing that I didn’t quite manage to get into “Neo Natal Sweet Potato” was the evolution of my relationship with one of the NICU nurses. Unlike the other nurses, who exuded tenderness and concern, this one had a really harsh demeanor. She was probably twenty years older than me and was openly critical of all us mothers, how we handled our babies. She would mutter things like, “Why are you being so stupid?” Every time she came on shift, my heart sank, because I was very in need of babying myself, wondering what had gone wrong with my baby, whether she would ever get out, grieving the disparity between how I had thought it would be and how it was. I didn’t think I could feel any worse than I did, but this nurse seemed to have made it her personal mission to prove otherwise, and boy, was she succeeding. So, one morning, about four days into our ordeal, one of the neonatologists finds me weeping beside Inky’s incubator, and although she tended to be a fairly brisk fish herself, she paused to ask me what was wrong. I (melodramatically) snapped that I had a sick baby; It is to her credit that she didn’t roll her eyes and move on, given that among the many patients in her care were two crazed crack babies, an abandoned preemie, and at least one permanently and severely damaged child whose immigrant parents didn’t speak English and appeared to be living well below the poverty line. Instead, she lingered and within seconds, I was tattling on the mean nurse. “I’ll speak to her,” the doctor said, making a note on her clipboard. The next morning, when that nurse came on shift Greg had himself braced to spring to my defense, knowing that I was a gossamer thread away from nervous collapse. But lo and behold, she walked right up to us, made this funny little bow and very formally wished us a good morning. It felt like a miracle, given that she never greeted anyone, not even her fellow employees. Well, that was better, but I didn’t feel inclined to let go of my grudge. Righteous indignation made a pleasant change of pace from abject misery, you know? Soon, Inky was showing great improvement, and I started to let my hair down a bit, reassured that we’d be discharged as soon as she completed a full course of antibiotics. So, one afternoon, I was chatting with this younger nurse whom I really liked and I started busting on the mean nurse, saying that I thought she should be fired because of her lack of bedside manners. I’d expected the younger nurse to side with me, because nobody likes a bitchy coworker, right? But instead, she said, “Yes, I know the parents have problems with her, but from a technical standpoint, she is the best nurse on the unit. I really respect her medical knowledge. She’s an excellent nurse. Believe me, no one is equipped to give your baby better care.” Touche!

   After that, I started being a little nicer to the mean nurse, who in turn started becoming less mean and more mother-hen-like, telling me to take a shower and shaking her head, laughing, over my determination to institute The Family Bed. I guess I was reminded of Nurse N. when you brought up “Space Monkey”. She got a big bang out of how I called that final IV Inky’s “antenna”. On the day that we left, she told me to come back and visit. She said that she probably wouldn’t remember my name, but that if I said the word “antenna”, she would know who I was. So… that was a very long anecdote to say, be nice to the nurses, and remember that they’re people too, with lives outside your personal hell. Just as sometimes, some of them need to be reminded that their job is being carried out on the battlegrounds of someone else’s worst nightmare.

   I should add that when I floated the 3 pieces of advice I’m giving here past Greg, he took issue with this one. I’m a “catch more flies with honey” type, but he says that the overwhelming evidence is that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

3. Carry a pad of paper and a pen with you everywhere. Be ready to jot down the essentials when a doctor rushes through an unfamiliar litany of tests, diagnostic information or treatment plans. You’ll also have a place to record some of your tumultuous emotions, or to describe the events of birth, which slip so easily from memory if the grisly specifics aren’t recorded within that first week or so. Select one of the many friends and family members who are aching to do something nice for you to buy you a nice hardbound journal, not some flimsy, spiral-bound memo bad that’ll go all to tatters and eventually disappear amid the household flotsam. This is a document you’ll want to hang onto. Try to snag a copy of the medical records from this period now. They’ll come in handy if your pediatrician has need of a complete medical history further on down the line.

As a special added bonus, here are 3 tips for friends and family members of parents who find themselves in the NICU. I reckon this advice might even hold water around parents of older kids who wind up in the hospital for an extended stay.

1. Don’t call asking for an update every couple of hours. That jangling phone really stressed me out after awhile, especially if there was no news on my end, or no good news, or news that was sure to blow the caller’s cool. (Most grandmas freak at the very mention of “spinal tap”.) If you are going to explode if you don’t call at least once a day, make it brief. Say something like, “I just wanted to let you know that we’re all thinking of you and we’re so excited to meet that amazing little baby.” If the new parent wants or needs to talk longer, he or she will let you know. Don’t take it personally if he or she needs to hang up right away. The doctor whose visit has been hotly anticipated all day might have just walked into the room, with all of 45 seconds to spare before proceeding onto the next patient.
2. In the age of the Internet , you could offer to set up a blog where other friends and family members could receive status reports and offer words of support. If it’s a situation where one parent is in the NICU with the baby round the clock and the other parent (if there is another parent) is not, offer to let the parent who’s not hospital-bound author the updates and either email them to you or plug them into the template you’ve set up. (This is one blog you won’t get a book contract out of, pal.) They might prefer for you to handle the whole shebang, filing reports after checking in by phone, or they might find it therapeutic to write some or all of it themselves.
3. Rather than asking a stressed out new parent whose brain is being fried in fifty different directions, “Is there anything I can do to help?” make concrete offers that can be fulfilled immediately. Still at a loss?
• If you have laundry that’s piling up, I could swing by this morning to pick it up, then drop it off tonight. I might even wash it! Ha ha!
• I was thinking maybe your (neglected) older child might like to have a sleepover with me on Saturday night. We’ll rent a movie and stay up late eating nothing but sugar.
• You know how I always say that I hate that filthy dog of yours? What I really mean is that I love him, and if you’d entrust his care to me, I can take over his care and feeding. I’m even prepared to pick up shit in a plastic bag, that’s how much I love you, I mean that filthy animal. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, I would be more than happy, nay, delighted, to pay for a professional dog minder for a week.
• I know you think hospital food is totally yummy, but I was hoping maybe you’d let me bring some sushi to the hospital at 5:00 – or wait, you tell me what time would work best for you. I shouldn’t bring any for the baby yet, should I?

Thank you Ayun, best of luck with the launch of your latest book. Come back to the Prattle for a book tour any time…

Today is the UK launch of a new parenting memoir – Mama Lama Ding Dong by Ayun Halliday (published under the title The Big Rumpus in the US).

I’m very excited to announce that Pewari’s Prattle has been asked to participate in her UK Virtual Book Tour which is running throughout August and will be visiting the Prattle on the 15th.

I’m hoping to get an interview with Ayun herself, so if you have any burning questions you’d like the author to answer – now is your chance! Pop your query in my comments and I’ll pass them along to Ayun.

In the meantime, you can follow the Virtual Book Tour as it wends its way through cyberspace, stopping at some fantastic parenting blogs along the way by visiting the Mama Lama Ding Dong tour page for a full list of dates and venues.

It’s getting serious.

I’m referring to the ever growing book tower by the side of my bed. My “pending” pile. It’s getting to epic proportions and I’m convinced it’s going to topple over and smother me in my sleep if I don’t do something about it now.

Of course, I can’t just put them on the bookshelves (even supposing there was actually space on our bookshelves), no… I’m actually going to have to be self-disciplined and read them, and it’s not like there isn’t a wide variety to choose from: back issues of Granta magazines, photography magazines, my latest online reading group selection and 12 Mills & Boons (yes, I subscribe, so shoot me!) that I haven’t quite got around to yet. I’m adding to the pile quicker than I can get through them.

So, I’ve hit on this master plan – a way to completely neglect my children while getting essential reading done while still appearing to be a Good Mother [tm]. Book half-hour! I get my book, a board book for Li’l Bhaji and a picture book for Akra Jr down from upstairs. They get to look at the pictures in their books while I curl up on the sofa and ignore them for the half hour after school is out. Okay, so the first attempt didn’t go quite as well as expected with Li’l Bhaji interrupting me every five seconds to point out all the interesting things in his book … I just have to perfect the scheme, right?

Just a quick heads up… the paperback version of The Order of the Phoenix is in Tescos at the moment for a mere £3.73 – a fantastic saving on the list price of £7.99. Just thought I’d let you know…

My first month’s Mills and Boon subscription arrived in the post today. Well that’s the night feeds’ entertainment sorted for a while…

My reading muscles aren’t feeling very intellectual at the moment, so I’ve gone for some light weight entertainment in Mills & Boon (shush, I like them).

So there I am last night, really getting into this romance and the main characters, interested in what was going to happen next and how the guy was going to get the girl, when all of a sudden the main character changed…

… into a mermaid.

WTF?! WHAT WAS THE AUTHOR THINKING?!

I mean, I know these books are supposed to be fantasy, but surely that’s taking it a bit too far? I like to feel at least that it *might* happen, even though I know it doesn’t. I kept on reading right to the end, hoping against hope that maybe the author would regain my trust by having an “it was all a dream/metaphor” sequence in it, but she didn’t. I registered my disgust by throwing the book against the bedroom wall when I finished (it’s a quirk of mine – I find it very catharthic when I’ve wasted part of my life on a book I hated).

Mills & Boon sure aren’t what they used to be.