It must be weird being pregnant in this day and age. If you believe the media everyone has an opinion (or a judgment) on your body, your presumed decision, your lifestyle, they watch what you eat (I've seen people watch pregnant women eating - it's true - it's like watching those people who watch fat people eat hamburgers while maintaining a 'holier than thou' sneer!) and they talk about you behind your back.

But there are some sensible books to be had out there in the world away from op-ed pieces about super-size prams and folate. Rachel Cusk is an English fiction writer who found herself washed up on the shore of motherhood with little or no resources and a problematic relationship with her own mother. Essentially, A Life's Work is a nuts and bolts account from an insider of a baby's first year. Cusk writes: "I often think that people wouldn't have children if they knew what it was like." It winds up not just being a book about motherhood but also about mothers - and she says things that I know many women would never say out loud. A must read for women (and men) at all stages of pregnancy and parenthood - including those who will never go down that road. It has also made me want to read her fiction as the book is compelling and a real page turner.

Buddhism for Mothers and the new one Buddhism for Mothers of School Chidlren by Sarah Napthali are all about maintaining calm in the eye of the storm of parenthood. And yes, it does annoy me that the title isn't 'Buddhism for Parents' but then perhaps she wouldn't have such a direct line into the anxiety mothers carry in our society. All you 'partners' out there need to read and think about these books as well.

While all women get told what others (including other women) think about breeding, there are taboo subjects around pregnancy and parenthood still, including miscarriage, still birth, infertility and premature babies. I have a customer whose first child died not long after birth. She was in the other day trying to find a book to give a friend who had just lost her first child. She was saying that when she lost her baby she was given books on depression, biographies of women who had lost their babies and never recovered, on meditation and Jesus. None of which she particularly wanted to read - 'good intentions are not good enough!' she said with a laugh. She decided to give her friend a beautiful book called Small Miracles. While it is a bit of a self-help guide through grief and loss it also has stories of others who have gone through similar events and come out the other side and is ultimately hopeful amid all the distress.

More Peas Please is perfect for this day and age. Dealing with difficult, fussy and allergic eaters it is a fun, practical guide for getting those solids into those children with as little drama as possible. A welcome relief to dinner tables around the country, I imagine.

And Andrew Fuller, author of Tricky People has a new book out, Tricky Kids which I kind of like because he doesn't lay any blame and simply talks about identifying the behaviour in the kids and how to correct it - or at least how to negotiate so you can get out the door each day. And he's quite charming and funny in tone - if you have a Manipulator, a Negotiator, a Debator, a Competitor or a Dare Devil in your household then this book is for you. And if you have an emerging Passive Resistor in the family then this book is definitely for you!

Sometimes I think working in a bookshop is like being inside a large organic jigsaw rumbling with its own idiosyncratic logic and bits of blue sky that just don't seem to want to fit where we think they should go. We have categories but the ideas or the references or the connections overflow these categories and resist any taming.

For instance, let's look at music, film and books. I know that's what we look at all day but when a book as good as In The City: A Celebration of London Music by Paul Du Noyer comes along it deserves to be held up and shaken about a bit to see what pieces fall out.

This month's release of Absolute Beginners on DVD would be easy to file as THAT 1986 musical by Blonde Bowie – all China Girl, linen suits, the 80s years – but after reading Du Noyer’s cartography of London music and influences, the film resonates with much broader meaning.

Absolute Beginners is based on a novel by Colin MacInnes set in London in 1958. Most of MacInnes novels stand as rare chronicles of London underground cultures that met, held hands, tore each other’s clothes off and became the future of rock and roll. Soho espresso bars were the hub for jazz kids, Jamaican migrants, political agitators and the modish dandies who wrote the blueprints for youth culture. That amazing English film director, Julien Temple directed Absolute Beginners, and alongside the leads of Bowie, Patsy Kensit and Eddie O'Connell, there are cameos and bits played by Steven Berkoff, Sade, Robbie Coltrane and Mandy Rice-Davies. Temple gives the film a widescreen technicolour sheen that Baz Luhrmann would envy. The studio tried to sell it as an English Dirty Dancing but that was never going to work. There was too much of the Dennis Potter in it.

Things you can learn from Paul Du Noyer’s book, In The City: A Celebration of London Music:

Mayfair took its name from an annual ceremony, a May Fair, for the “fair maiden lepers” of St James Church, Piccadilly;

The first play Noel Coward wrote opened in London in 1923 and was called The Young Idea, a farce referred to as a 'comedy of youth'. He also wrote a revue called London Calling - The Jam fans and The Clash fans know what that is all about;

The term 'jingoism' derives from a Music Hall song from the Prussian Wars whose chorus went something like "We'll fight them and win by jingo by jingo";

And the evolutionary list looks like this: John Dowland, Gilbert & Sullivan, Music Hall, Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Max Miller, Tommy Steele, Anthony Newley, David Bowie, Ian Dury, Dizzee Rascal, Lily Allen.

So, from one book the threads spin out across the shop through all the safely 'categorised' shelves - if you like English music or if you like Julien Temple's films or if you like the stories of Hanif Kureishi or Nick Hornby or Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night, Sunday Morning was turned into a truly compelling film that hasn't dated) then you will be spending some time jigsawing your way around the shelves. I'm just waiting for a re-release of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Now that was a great film! But I might just fill in the wait with reading Kureishi's last novel Something to tell You - yes, it has been out for ages but I just haven't got to it yet.

I have to confess that I love American writing. My favourite writer is Cormac McCarthy and I have read Thomas Pynchon, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and have begun on the entire works by E.L. Doctorow and Elizabeth Strout. There is a surety of language, a confidence American writers exude that I don't often find in Australian writing. They seem to be able to place humans against the environment with little effort, while retaining focus and emotion. McCarthy and Doctorow in particular, are so seamless in their story telling that it is almost as if the reader is pulled through their books.

I am quite excited about McCarthy's The Road being adapted to the screen - it opened 28 January and I will see it this weekend. But to discover E.L. Doctorow is quite fantastic. The March tells the story of the final march across America, at the every end of the Civil War, by the victor General Sherman and his forces. Doctorow picks up and drops characters as the soldiers march through towns and plains and cross marshlands and rivers always moving forward and with a gathering momentum. Ragtime is next on my list of his works, another re-working of the historical fiction genre about America, specifically New York city, from 1906 up until they join World War 1 in 1917. And I am also going to read the previous novels by Elizabeth Strout who wrote the sublime Olive Kitteridge, Abide With Me and Amy and Isabelle.

And while I am praising American writers, David Finkel, another confident American writer but from a journalism background with The Washington Post, spent eight months embedded with the 2-16 Battalion sent into Iraq to spearhead the 2007 surge of troops. The book he wrote as a result of that experience, The Good Soldiers, is a compelling, profoundly moving, observational telling of modern day warfare. Finkel manages, again effortlessly it would appear, to detail the different wars we label as Iraq. The war in Washington, the war on the ground experienced by the US infantry and the chasm that exists between the soldiers and the Iraqi civilian experience. It is at times horrific, confusing and dispiriting but also a masterpiece about all warfare. Finkel shows, with his unwavering eye, measured prose and 'incandescent' imagery what it is to be a US soldier now. He will not let you look away and you won't forget this book.