On one of my many daily scrolls through Instagram a few months ago, I came across one of those typically beautiful photos of a book and a coffee, the kind of aspirational post that makes it impossible for a book lover not to double-tap. But my friend’s caption gave me pause: “There isn’t too much I miss about my pre-baby life, but getting a break and sitting in a coffee shop for an hour to leisurely read makes me feel like the old me for a while.”

Once I confirmed I was indeed pregnant, I was shocked at how much time of the day I spent just thinking about it: searching online for medical advice, going to doctor appointments, anxiously awaiting doctor appointments, trying to decide how to answer sideways looks from my friends when they see me pass on a martini at the bar. I went through the entire first trimester without having made my way through a single book — a long time for me, and when Twin Peaks premiered on Showtime I only got two episodes in before I just stopped watching.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to be pregnant to be distracted in 2017. Social media is full of memes about the world burning down around us, and the endless stream of push alerts coming from the White House are enough to distract anyone from making progress on anything except therapy bills, much less the ability to focus on a great novel. But as I entered the third trimester I realized if I wanted to read, I had better do it now.

So what does one read when she finds herself on a one-way collision course with a major life-changing event that may prevent her from finishing any books in the near future that she doesn’t read aloud?

Before my pregnancy, I had never read Proust. In college I attended a lecture about Bloomsbury and Proust given by the brilliant Mary Ann Caws. When I shyly admitted that I hadn’t read Proust, she asked how old I was and told me that I shouldn’t read Proust until I was older, “with a little more life behind you.” Thirty-two and with child, I figured it was now or never, so I asked my husband to get on the ladder and pluck down the copy of Swann’s Way I had purchased at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris many moons ago.

Proust is a revelation. As a lover of Virginia Woolf, Swann’s Way brought her work back to life for me. I had flashbacks of long afternoons spent reading and underlining. And I could see the link between Proust’s endless, breathless sentences and the work of some of my other favorite writers, like W. G. Sebald, Javier Marías, and Thomas Bernhard. Maybe Dr. Caws was right. Reading the narrator’s obsession with his mother coming to kiss him goodnight in the Combray section not only made me think of my own childhood but of my baby as well. Would he wait in desperation for me?

The only problem with reading Proust is that it made me want to read all those other books again. I wanted to re-read To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, The Years — I wanted to re-read Austerlitz and The Emigrants and A Heart So White, The Loser, Frost, the second volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle! But I couldn’t rightly re-read now, there wasn’t time! There isn’t time. Also, reading Swann’s Way made me too full for anything else. I tried to read it on the train, but there kept being sections I wanted to underline, and no one would give me a seat. I tried to read it while waiting at the doctor’s office, but it was too emotional, trying to focus on Swann’s futile search for love while pregnant women endured the anxiety of waiting to hear their baby’s heartbeat, or for test results, to make sure everything was okay.

Even Swann’s Way remains unfinished at this point. I’m stuck at page 219. Should I keep reading? Who can say? I took a break to read — of all things — true crime. On a flight to Los Angeles I devoured Hampton Sides’s Hellhound on His Trail, on the manhunt for James Earl Ray. At first I thought: This is ridiculous, you should be reading Crime and Punishment. (I haven’t read the Russians, either. I’ve only read Anna Karenina; it’s shameful, I know.) But instead I was reading this book about Martin Luther King’s assassination! And though I still want to read Crime and Punishment, I’m glad I read Hellhound on His Trail. I was dumbfounded by just how little I knew about the crime. What kind of a parent would I have been with this huge hole in my knowledge?

But as you can tell, that just opens up a whole other can of worms. What kind of a person will I be — what kind of a parent will I be — if I’ve never read Crime and Punishment?

Then there are the new books. Rachel Cusk’s Transit, the second in her trilogy, has been out for a while, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading it, so I did so on the way back home from Los Angeles. Was I really reading, though? At this point my anxiety over finishing things had reached a fever pitch. I read Transit like a depressed person on a gluten-free diet reaches for that second doughnut. And believe me, that wasn’t just an analogy. Home and exhausted, I scroll through my Twitter feed for what feels like hours, reaching for that second doughnut, that we all know will end in guilt and self-punishment. At night, even though I should be reading . . . A Tale of Two Cities, finally finishing Middlemarch . . . I’m just amped-up on Twitter. And then, with visions of the apocalypse dancing in my head, I can’t sleep.

In one of the early episodes of the popular TV show This Is Us I caught a glimpse of Mandy Moore’s character holding a copy of Stephen King’s novel Misery under her arm while she was preparing breakfast for her many children. I thought: Well, she’s just getting in her reading whenever she can. Maybe it’s possible. Another friend of mine said that she read lots of books when her daughters were little — while she was breastfeeding — but only “trashy” books, scrolling with one hand on her phone.

Curiously, I didn’t immediately think to seek out reading that addressed the central fact of my life. But the same friend who had posted the caption about reading and time on Instagram recommended Rachel Cusk’s wonderful A Life’s Work. It immediately made me feel less alone and terrified — I wanted to give it to all the people close to me who were not pregnant, so that they could understand. “My experience of reading, indeed of culture, was profoundly changed by having a child,” she writes. Uh-oh. But she goes on: “In the sense that I found the concept of art and expression far more involving and necessary, far more human in its drive to bring forth and create, than I once did.”

Another deeply satisfying book on becoming a parent, Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, acknowledges that there’s no time for reading, let alone writing. But, after her daughter was born, “the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma [the baby] made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.”

So maybe it’s not so bad, after all. Whether you’re expecting, anxiety-ridden, exhausted from other means, or if your thumb is about fall off from refreshing your Twitter feed, maybe we’re just too hard on ourselves. The fact is, none of us know what’s coming. Our “expectations” are just that — expectations. I don’t know if my baby will sleep through the night, if I’ll be able to breastfeed, or if I’ll ever be able to have any time to myself ever again. None of us know when the next news alert will signal the beginning of the end, or if the sun will just cease to shine one day. A friend and father of two children said to me, “Look, lots of people are going to give you advice, and I realize I’m about to do the same thing, but . . . if you aren’t worried about something, don’t worry about it. Just enjoy it.” It seemed like an oversimplification of magnum proportions, but it actually makes sense. So instead of forcing myself to forge through War and Peace, I’m off to re-read To the Lighthouse. And I’m going to enjoy it.

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I have always loved reading about places and time periods that are new to me. It probably goes hand-in-hand with my love of traveling. Books are much cheaper than airfare, plus the only jet lag you’ll get is if you stay up too late reading.

When I realized that I was writing a historical novel, these books gave me courage. They are meticulously researched to give readers an evocative and precise sense of place, but they are not history books. They are about relationships, family, love, and the minutiae and immensity of human experience in times of great political turmoil.

The God of Small Things
By Arundhati Roy

Each time I return to this book, I’m scared I won’t love it as much as I think I do, which gives you an idea of how much this book was an Event in my life. My fear is unfounded, though, because I’ve read it half a dozen times in its entirety and who knows how many other times in pieces, and loved it more each time. One of my copies is utterly destroyed with notes and tags and dog-ears because I’ve figuratively ripped it apart to understand how it works. I think Ms. Roy wouldn’t mind that, though, because she was trained as an architect, and she has said that “writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat — patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I’ve found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well — the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page . . . I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. ‘Later’ became ‘Lay. Ter.’ ‘An owl’ became ‘A Nowl.’ ‘Sour metal smell’ became ‘sourmetal smell.’ ” (http://ift.tt/2xWCDAI)

That playfulness of language mixed with the power of her themes and plot, which are serious and often tragic, is intoxicating. Maybe because English is my second language (though now it’s my more fluent language by far), Roy’s deconstructed words and manners of speech lit all sorts of pleasure centers in my brain.

The Invisible Bridge
By Julie Orringer

This was a surprise love for me, the kind of deep dive into a book-world that made me resentful of intrusions like eating, sleeping, and remembering to reply to my husband if he asked me a question while sitting four feet away. A 600-page story about World War II and the Holocaust might seem like a heavy burden, and of course it is — it’s a book to read when you have the mental and emotional space to bear it — but the rewards more than compensate. The wartime experience of Hungarian Jews, who suffered from anti-Semitic laws in their country but were “protected” from Nazi camps for the early years of the war because Hungary joined Germany, was a history I had not known about. This story alone would have been an achievement, a 300-page epic. But what makes this novel truly great is how Orringer intimately portrays the main characters’ prewar lives, their “normal” hopes and dreams — to be an architect, to be a physician, to fall in love — and how those ambitions became narrowed to survival with the onset of war. And although this could be considered Andras and Klara’s love story, I was most moved by the bond between the brothers Andras, Tibor, and Matyas, by how these most fundamental, taken-for-granted relationships can be sources of strength and endurance.

Fox Girl
By Nora Okja Keller

I devoured this in one sitting in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep — or more accurately, it devoured me, because this is a story with teeth. Sharp teeth meant for tearing. Keller’s prose here, following the experiences of three teenagers growing up near the U.S. army base in 1960s Korea, is brutal and riveting. Hyun Jin is the narrator, and the distance between her mind and the reader’s collapses to nil as she describes what happens to her best friend, Sookie, the abandoned daughter of an American GI and Korean prostitute. Lobetto is another abandoned child, the son of a black American GI and Korean mother. The three friends struggle to survive and claim their identities in the sex- and violence-fueled economy around the army base, called America Town.

The story of children, particularly mixed-race children abandoned by American soldiers and Korean women in postwar Korea, is one that I hadn’t encountered before in American literature. This was a courageous, unflinching portrayal of a painful subject. After the sun came up and I finally stumbled to bed, I remembered these characters as if I had known and loved them for much longer than a night.

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Deborah Campbell, on assignment for Harper’s, arrived in Damascus in 2007 to begin researching an article on Syria’s Iraqi refugee community. How does a Western reporter show up in an impoverished and insular neighborhood like Damascus’s Little Baghdad, home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighboring Iraq, and figure out what the story is and how to gain access to it? The first answer, as Campbell explains in her gripping new book, A Disappearance in Damascus, is in locating a good fixer. Campbell was exceedingly lucky in finding Ahlam, herself an Iraqi refugee, but after they had worked together for months, her fixer, who was by then her friend, was seized by the Syrian authorities. The book is Campbell’s account of her relationship with Ahlam and her efforts to find her during her months-long disappearance.

Campbell deftly deploys memoir and reporting to numerous ends: not only to describe her search for Ahlam but also to capture the damage wrought by the American-led invasion of Iraq and to put in context the devastating civil war that would soon have Syria sending refugees out to the world rather than taking them in. Along the way, Campbell, a Canadian now teaching at the University of British Columbia, provides a fascinating look at how journalists work, an inside perspective that feels particularly useful at a time when the profession is under fire.

A fixer, the author writes, works “in murky times and murky places.” He or she “is the local person who makes journalism possible in places where the outsider cannot go alone. Arranging interviews, interpreting, providing context and background, sensing with their fingertips the direction of the winds, fixers are conduits of information and connections. And when they say, ‘It’s time to leave,’ it is always time to leave.”

Ahlam, fearless, tireless, and fiercely independent, “a cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other,” had been a fixer in Baghdad for the Wall Street Journal during the early months of the Iraq war. Fluent in English (she was the first person in her village, male or female, to earn a university degree), she then began working for an Iraqi humanitarian organization overseen by the U.S. military. Rumors circulated that she was a spy for the Americans, and she was kidnapped, beaten, and interrogated for three days. After her family raised a hefty ransom, she fled an increasingly lawless Iraq for Syria with her husband and children.

Ahlam resumed working with journalists while also getting a school for displaced girls off the ground. She was so well connected in Damascus that Campbell could simply spend the day in her living room, a hub for refugees, in order to get her fill of neighborhood news. But some of the problems Ahlam had faced in Iraq followed her to Syria. Her arrest was in part related to her association with the American military back in her home country. Her work with journalists was risky, too (the authorities believed Campbell was an agent of the CIA or Mossad), leading the author to worry that she was in part responsible for Ahlam’s arrest.

Campbell, whose writing is direct and unguarded, is aware that she has “the status of a lucky birth in a lucky country at a lucky time for women,” while Ahlam is “one of history’s casualties.” Her inability to glean any information about Ahlam’s whereabouts from the Syrian bureaucracy gives Campbell a sense of life on the other side of the divide. “The sense of powerlessness was humbling,” she writes. “It is how most of the world lives.” The depth of the friendship between two women from such different circumstances is both poignant and hopeful, even as the contrast between them is stark. In addition to experiencing the horrors of war, Ahlam has suffered the death of a young child and exile from her country. Campbell’s problems, primarily her protracted breakup with a boyfriend back in Canada who’s upset by her long absences, don’t compare, as she acknowledges. She devotes too many pages to the dissolution of that relationship when the one with Ahlam will be the most interesting to readers.

As I was reaching the end of the book, the president of the United States referred to journalists, in a tweet, as “truly bad people.” As a result of Trump’s original travel ban in January, Iraqis who had worked with the American military were prohibited from entering the country (the revised order removed Iraq from the list of targeted countries). What woefully upside-down times we live in. A segment of the population, from the president on down, sees reporters and Iraqi refugees as villains. One wishes they would read Campbell’s book, in which a reporter and a refugee, each devoted to healing the world in her own way, come off as heroes.

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