20 Best Books For Pregnancy (2023 Update)

“I started to feel a series of quickenings in my uterus. I say a series, because they felt multiple. This was no defined kick, tap, flutter, hunger pang or bubble of gas. It didn’t remotely fit the image of a woman pressing a hand to her bump in shock that I had seen in countless films and television series over the years. I was in no particular place when it happened, and there was no outward recognition when it did. I wasn’t even sure if it was what I thought it was at first. And yet, something electrical, like the fusing of wires. A string of lights flickering, then turning on. Swaying. Soft knock-knock against the wall of my womb. Shadows in an old cave. Each time I felt these sensations, I felt jubilant, as if my body had made a clever discovery and was exclaiming, ‘Ah-ha!’ Each one was a yes resounding through my body, the most literal affirmation of life. Of the foetus, yes, but I didn’t expect its stirrings to revitalise my own sense of being here, in this moment and time, full of my own too-quick life” Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy is a non-fiction book by British journalist and author, Chitra Ramaswamy. When she finally falls pregnant, Ramaswamy shares her personal experience of it in her own unique way, giving the reader the literary intellectual’s perspective. She describes scans, body changes, prenatal classes, foetal movements, home-birth preparations, travelling and having a “babymoon”, as well as the effect of her pregnancy on her feelings about her parents, and relates all this to literature, art, poetry, sculpture, landscape and film. She quotes from, or refers to, works by Plath and Proust, Frida Kahlo, Sontag and St Jerome and de St Exupery, Jung and Joyce, Nan Shepherd, Garcia Marquez, Atwood, Toni Morrison, Coleridge, Tolstoy, Zadie Smith, Almodovar, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nora Ephron and Voltaire, to mention but a few. On the word pregnant, she says “There is the sense of pregnancy carrying weight, depth or meaning. The pregnant pause. The pregnant moment. The pregnant utterance. By the late fourteenth century, to be pregnant also meant to be convincing, weighty or pithy. A pregnant argument was a compelling one”. On early pregnancy: “…how could something the size of a mere kidney bean be wreaking such havoc? There was almost no weight to it, it took up virtually no space in the world, yet it was a burden – and a secret one at that. There was enough of it to make me pee constantly, catch my breath at the top of a flight of stairs, and fall asleep in the early hours of the evening on the sofa”. On talking to other pregnant women: “you ended up talking about cravings, nursery schemes, birth plans and all the other nice, clean, safe pregnancy topics that papered over the reality. Like a magpie, you started to steal glittering, distracting phrases about pregnancy that others might want to hear and lined your nest with them, using them to protect yourself from a world that seemed increasingly loud, bright, hazardous and out of step with what was happening to you”. Ramaswamy’s descriptive prose is highly evocative. This is a book that may appeal to women who are pregnant, have been pregnant, or might, one day, be pregnant. Outside this demographic, both the relevance and enjoyment are likely to be diminished. Original and different.