Recommended Reading on Reading

Adam Serwer of The American Prospect has a wonderful blog post about Lorraine Hansberry. I had a paper doll of her in my "notable american women" collection, and along with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Harriet Beecher Stowe, she therefore became an early favorite. Anyway his post--about race, gender and sexuality in her life and work and legacy--is far less trivial than that anecdote, and well worth reading.

My idol-in-bloggage, Novelist Jennifer Weiner, has a post up at HuffPo about gender and genre in the book world and how the subjects covered by "serious" men and "unserious" women are converging, even though the double-standard is still in play. It's a very thoughtful and hip essay.

Go read these posts now and edify thyselves!

Jennifer Weiner pwns The Literary Elite's Misogny, Part ???

I already shared this on google reader, but I just wanted to make my readership aware of the awesomeness. EBC and bestselling authoress Jennifer Weiner writes a scathingly funny take on the double-standard applied to female and male "tell-all" memoirists, a post that is already causing a stir. She targets the New York Times Book Review, which we all know is one of my favorite targets for feminist vengeance, too!

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So, just to be clear, if you’re a lady and you ‘fess up to an unhealthy online interest in an ex, you may have “lost it entirely.”

If you’re a dude and you write about, say, smoking pot with your prepubescent son, scoring coke with your daughters asleep in your car, or spewing uncontrollable diabetes-related diarrhea all over your son’s back seat, well then you, sir, have written “a bruising survival story,” or a “brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book.”

If you’re a chick who sleeps around and lives to tell (and sell) the tale, you’re greedy, vain and charmless. If you’re a guy who spends nights on end looking at Internet porn and days investing in drug companies that overcharge cancer patients for their cures, then you’re “formidably smart.”

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Read the rest here. And have a happy weekend. I'm off to see Rachel Getting Married.

Good in Bed

I adore Jennifer Weiner's blog, so I figured that her books must be good too. I decided to start with her debut, Good in Bed, which is about the love and life travails of a "larger" woman, Cannie, whose ex-boyfriend starts writing a sex column for a woman's mag--a humiliating, and incredibly brilliant, opening premise.

Supporting characters include Cannie's newly-gay mom + said mom's brilliantly acerbic partner, Cannie's dog, her serial-dater best friend, a Hollywood "it girl,"--oh yeah and Cannie's unintended pregnancy and her postpartum depression. What starts as a light romp ends up being a seriously touching book. It even jerked a few tears out of my cynical eyes (oh who are we kidding, I'm a sap!).

I definitely recommend Good in Bed: the book isn't formulaic. There's not much shopping to speak of and only a few margaritas.

So it's in the fine tradition of Bridget Jones but less whimsical: emotional, thoughtful, pop-culturally savvy, hilarious fiction about the interior and exterior lives of an urban, modern woman, proving that the whole "chick-lit" moniker has sexist overtones. If it were written by a guy it would be straight up literary fiction.

I've long been looking for the citified Jewish equivalent to Maeve Binchy's Irish charm and Anita Shreve's WASPy New England heatbreak.

Jennifer Weiner is it. Hooray!

Jennifer Weiner

I've never read her books, but I've been meaning to. Maybe I will pick one up tomorrow!

Anyway, her new novel is coming out April 8th, and she's in the news because of it. Weiner's blog is totally brilliant. She is brilliant. She has clever things to say about all things writerly and womanly, she's anti-elitist but extremely intelligent, and also quite witty. She's at the center of the chick-lit vs "regular lit" debate and has sassy, smart observations on this push-pull, very tongue-in-cheek.

Kind of like a Northeastern Intellectual Jewish version of Helen Fielding. I can't say how much I think you all should check out the blog. That is all.

Awesome.

Jennifer Weiner, author of much loved she-centric (not chick-lit) fiction, has a blog, and it's funny, interesting and super egalitarian. She bashes privilege like a pro! Rock on.