Jasmine must choose a skirt or a gown.
Her friend Rajah looks on with a frown.
Jasmine and Aladdin enjoy a starry night.
Her green outfit is truly just right.

Now I’m no poetry expert, but even I can see that this is abominable verse. The singsongy rhythm and forced rhyme are annoying enough, but the fact that this whole book is about what the princesses wear – ugh! I wanted to poke out my eyes.

Doug just flat out refused to read the books. “Why do you let her bring them home?” he asked me. “They’re horrific.”

I just stared at him. It had never occurred to me that I could censor these books. I mean, I’m a supporter of the first amendment and all. “I can do that?” I said. “Make her leave them at the library?”

It was Doug’s turn to stare. “You’re her mother.”

“But it’s censorship.”

“Kimberlee, she’s four. She doesn’t know how to discern good literature from crap writing. We have to teach her. How’s she going to learn that this -” he waved his hand at the pile of Disney princess books “- is garbage if you keep filling her brain with it? You wouldn’t let her eat Twinkies, so why would you let her feed junk food to her mind?”

Doug was right. I’d never let Jane eat a steady diet of junk food. We don’t even keep junk food in the house (well, with the occasional exception of barbeque potato chips, for which I have a secret weakness). Over the course of these four years, Doug and I have taught her to like food that is good for her body. The girl eats – and enjoys – kale salad, broccoli, spinach, and chard. Sure, she might eat her weight in Twinkies if we let her, but we don’t.

I am horrified when people tell me they feed their kids Nutella and Fluff sandwiches on WonderBread because that’s what they want to eat.

But that’s what I’ve been doing with these stupid Disney princess books. I’ve been letting her eat Nutella and Fluff simply because she likes it.

Um, hello? Where has my brain been? Apparently I’ve been eating too much Nutella and Fluff, too. Well, no more, for either of us. It’s time for me to teach her to like book-food that is good for her mind.

She can read the twaddle at the library if she wants, but for now I’ve decided it’s going to stay at the library. No more junk books or brain candy in the house. There are so many good books to read – far more good books to read than time to read them. From here on out, the books we bring home will be like the food we bring home: nourishing and delicious.

Because life’s too short to read bad books.

I am not one of those women.

In my humble opinion, pregnancy bites. Even an easy pregnancy like mine bites. The nausea, the heartburn, the nasty taste in your mouth, the chronic impaction, the sciatica, the exhaustion, the bloating, the stretching of every muscle and all the skin between your neck and your thighs, the way your body becomes this foreign entity with a mind all its own that slowly turns you into a pin-headed whale. I don’t know, somehow I’m just not feeling beautiful.

But the worst thing about pregnancy is the books it ruins.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. Half a dozen people whom I esteem had raved about it, and I decided to read it even though I generally don’t like contemporary American fiction (I know; ironic, isn’t it, for a contemporary American writing fiction…). Anyhoo, I’m sure Owen Meany is a good book, but I confess I can’t even think about it without feeling nauseated. What a waste.

Right now, for my book club, I’m reading Vanity Fair, a book I’ve wanted to read for years but never worked up the nerve to (it’s 698 pages with not nearly enough white space or a big enough typeface for a woman who wears bifocals), so I figured the accountability of my book club would force me to read it. I’m halfway through, and I can’t think about it without – you guessed it – feeling nauseated. I might finish it, but I doubt I’ll be reading it again, ever. Another waste of a perfectly good book.

So, in the interest of not ruining any more good books, I am hereby soliciting the titles of really bad books that I can read, books that are so bad they deserve to be associated with nausea. Anyone got a good (er, bad) one?

I read and canoed and read and hiked and read and played games and read. With my kids I read Mr. Popper’s Penguins and James and the Giant Peach. On my own I read half a dozen books, most of which shall remain nameless because they were disappointing and I don’t want to offend the authors.

I’ll write more about my summer reading later, but for now let’s just get my biggest disappointment out of the way, the book I thought was going to be the literary equivalent of a chick flick but wasn’t—because the hero and heroine didn’t get together!!!

As a reader, I was angry. I read 350 pages, road this whole roller coaster of a novel, and they don’t get together? Are you kidding?

No, the author was not kidding. I read the ending twice just to make sure I’d understood (and then I wrote a much more satisfactory one, a practice I highly recommend when you love a book but hate its ending).

Still, I can’t say I’m sorry I read it, because as a writer, I learned a very important lesson: the whole book matters. I was totally engaged in this book, devoured every word, couldn’t put it down, laughed, cried—and then the last few pages ruined it all, casting their shadow backward over everything that came before.

As a writer, I learned that I can’t afford to lose my readers, not even on page 347 of 350 pages. Good to know.