Skip to main content

Chick Lit Readership

Nice essay by Anita Nair on why chick lit is good for a woman's soul. Its so true that some women have to grow up to enjoy chick lit. Whereas at sixteen she wouldn't be caught dead with a Mills and Boon number, it is okay to convalesce from flu with gallons of soup and a pile of chick lit on the bedside table at fifty.

I remember checking out five to ten random Harlequin romances from the library for my neighbor Ms R when she was feeling under the weather and needed to stay home and rest. Her bookshelf was busy with serious literature and Ms R was no chick. I used to wonder about the Harlequin fix particularly the fact that she could go through those many in a day or two. She didn't even care what I got as long it was a whole bagful. I must be coming of age myself because I skim through chick lit in bulk when I'm in the mood for something light. To me it is not in any way different from a few hours mindless channel surfing.

Laksmi Chaudhry is of the opinion that all literature including Hemingway is chick lit today - most fiction does not cater to the tastes of men.

According to Brooks, we have burdened little boys with “new-wave” novels about “introspectively morose young women,” when they would be better served by suitably masculine writers like Ernest Hemingway. “It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture,” Brooks claims. “The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers).”

The case against chick lit or at least against their writers is that it undermines the credibility of serious women writers. While the readership of the two genres vary a good deal there are points of intersection and in that a possibility of combining the best of both worlds.

Comments

ggop said…
Here's what I think chick lit is - like comfort food for some readers. Its like indulging in chaat or a tub of haagen daaz. Its not going to do you any good but feels good/uplifting anyway. :)

gg
Heartcrossings said…
ggop - That's a great comparison :) Then some people get addicted to comfort food just as they do to chick-lit.
Anonymous said…
Your review of Mehta's Water clearly shows you lack any sense of critical analysis, you fail to back up your suppositions with anything of depth and I suspect you had a bad hair day or it was your time of the month
Heartcrossings said…
Anonymous - Thanks for taking the trouble to point out how incredibly dumb I am :) Not a lot of people bother. Where would Mehta be without such "enlightened" fans as yourself ?

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques