Chick lit will soon hopefully BE history.

I have read my fair share of "chick lit", and I can say with some assurance that Weisbergers first (and second, if it is at all similar) deserves every dish it takes not for its genre, but because it is simply a crummy book. No plot, no wit, no humor, no depth, bad prose...

And let's not forget the topic matter, and the fact that these novels simply perpetuate slavery to (bad) coture and a host of other ills that accompany it.

I'm not saying that all that may be considered "chick lit" (its now a genre? really) is bad...Bridget Jones'(was it?) was wonderful, but so far, its the only one I've found that is actually worth reading. Wolffs and Weisbegers, no thanks.

News to the world: You can read literary fiction and chicklit. And mysteries, and thrillers, and comic books, and substance abuse memoirs. The readers shunning chicklit seem to me to be second cousins to the people I've known who refuse to see any movie out of Hollywood. Yes, it's a good strategy for avoiding a lot of dreck, but you won't get to see Adaptation, either. A lot chicklit out there is lame, but Stephanie Lehmann is also packaged at a chicklit writer. I wouldn't have wanted to miss her because she was released in the chicklit genre. I resisted reading Confessions of a Shopaholic because it seemed so vapid and girly, which it indeed turned out to be, but it's also a genuinely funny book.

Much of what readers scorn is the marketing of these books, which can be deceptive as well as condescending to the female audience. Ann Tyler would probably receive much different cover treatment if she were starting out today. (A girl cutting a rock singer's name on her forehead--totally chicklit!) The adage that you can't judge a book by its cover still holds, even though publishers spend millions of dollars hoping people will.

(Disclosure: I write chicklit. And no, I'm not Stephanie Lehmann.)

The problem with "these books are recording history" is that the argument can be made for virtually all books. (Or really all things) There is history to be found in giant mutated ant movies from the 50s. It's nearly impossible to produce anything that doesn't record history in some fashion.

The argument that many good books were dismissed in their time also holds little weight. It is certainly true enough but that in itself is not much of an argument. Maybe in fifty years "Barbie Girl" by Aqua will be considered one of the greatest compositions in history. Hey, you never know!

The bottom line is that most of these chick-lit books aren't good. That's why people bash them. Women bash them more because they make women look rather vapid. If people want to read them and enjoy them feel free. They aren't any worse than Star Trek novels or romance novels. I would point out however that you typically don't see Star Trek novels and romance novels front and center in store displays.

Salon certainly has a weird and very obvious bias in covering women's issues. Maybe I should have put those last two words in quotes? Let my summarize:

Having a nanny is a hard, hard life.

Men in the city are all lazy slobs and we all know the women in their circle are way too good for them. (I still can't tell if this was even a serious article or not)

Did we mention how hard it is to have a nanny?

Raising kids on a high 5 figure salary is like super tough!

Especially when you factor in the nanny.

And now:

Those trashy guilty pleasures? Those are serious literature or something maybe!

It's all more amusing than anything. There has *got* to be some happy middle ground between defending chick-lit and producing dire warnings about the state of Roe vs. Wade! Not that these articles are bad. I find them interesting, but they do suffer from a very obvious sameness of perspective and seemed to be aimed (intentionally or not) at a very thin demographic slice.

A few weeks ago I was at a book club meeting with a group of 20-something women in publishing. When the subject of the most recent book we'd read came up, I told them I'd just finished a book by Jennifer Weiner that I enjoyed. Their reaction, "Uh... yeesh... did you know that's--[stage whisper]--chick lit?" I found it so annoying that they could dismiss something they hadn't even read (and something I'd just said I liked!) as being "chick lit." I asked them why it's ok to trivialize the voices of young women writing about what it's like being a young woman. No one had an answer and I think it's because they were only saying what they thought was the right thing to say.

I don't read 'chick lit' because the premises of the ones I've looked at don't interest me. So I cannot comment on any of these novels individually. One thing that puts me off many genre novels generally is the marketing of them, and the sameness with which they are presented. It seems, rightly or wrongly, as if they are all basically the same story. I'm not saying they are, but that is how they appear in the 'marketplace', to me.

I am a feminist, and I read novels written by women. I get annoyed at the shallowness with which some 'women's issues' are presented in the commercial world, as if all that women wanted was the power to bonk whoever they want, wearing whatever they want. If women wish to write novels which feature these things, that's fine. After all, we can't all read the same sorts of things all the time, and we do need some time out for entertainment.

I'm not really sure whether I want to have women's history represented by something that goes by the name of 'chick lit' however. I sometimes wonder if these novels and their writers are being defended too seriously. Are these writers really intending to produce lasting novels about serious issues, or pure entertainments? If the former, then they need to throw out their marketers. If the latter, or both, then they need to throw out their marketers! I think those who try to make these novels out to be something that perhaps they are not are doing them a disservice.

As I noted, I've not read any. But nothing I've read about them makes me want to read them, either. If I want to read about how women might fit into the world, about family, about relationships, about politics, then I tend to go to writers like those mentioned in the article: Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, George Eliot, Jane Austen. But also Lorrie Moore, William Faulkner, Shakespeare, Barbara Hanrahan and Janet Frame. Because reading shouldn't have to have any gender (or other) boundaries, and women can find themselves and the world in all sorts of literature.