Blogging Towards Bethlehem

She slouched on her dirt brown Levitz couch and read Janet Maslin's compendium of summer "chick lit" novels from the New York Times. She hesitated, her gnawed-on, calloused fingers perched warily atop her PowerBook, and wondered why these quite diverse reads had been lumped together so carelessly. "What does a non-fiction book about luxury goods like Bringing Home Birkin really have to do with a pitch black novel about a woman whose husband leaves her immediately after making bank in Silicon Valley, a la All We Ever Wanted Was Everything?" she wondered, tugging at the strap of her Forever 21 sundress. And then she realized: these books don't really have anything in common, other than the fact that they're marketed towards women and have the pale pink and baby blue covers to prove it.

To be sure, some of the books reviewed in Maslin's article are the bread and butter of the chick lit genre, like Lauren Weisberger's Chasing Harry Winston, with its "caipirinha-soaked" trio of materialistic harpies, she conceded. "But why do Birkin and Everything get thrown into the slush pile with the marriage-minded messes? And some of these books, despite their female friendly plots, must be better than others, mustn't they?" she wondered, pushing a lock of sun-bleached hair behind her ear. "So why are they all thrown into the same catch-all review?"

She toggled back to the front page of the books section and sighed deeply. Of the seventeen other articles on the books index, only two were about works written by women. Dejected, she crawled back into the fuchsia ghetto of the Styles section to read more stories about sunglasses.

On the Beach, Under A Tiffany-Blue Sky [NY Times]

Bringing Home Birkin

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything