Gwenda

Meghan McCarron weighs in on the chick lit = tempest making the rounds (again) this week:

The arguement, as well as I can parse it, goes, "Lots of women in the 19th century wrote a lot of popular but forgettable novels that society decried, and a tantalizingly similar thing is going on now. The 19th century produced Jane Austen, whose books (okay, movies) we all know and love, so it’s totally okay that the 21st century’s female literary culture resembles that of the 19th."

That is a terrible arguement. No one deserves that arguement. In fact, if I were to argue in favor of chick lit, from one genre ghetto to another, let’s say, I would put it like this: Pulp always has something to teach us. Its freedom from respectability allows it to experiment, most notably with voice and convention, in a way the literary mainstream rarely attempts (see: Chandler. See: Dick). Chick lit is no exception. I’ve read very little of it, but what charmed me about what I have read was the voice. It observed ravenously, it paid hommage to the world of female friendship, and made me laugh. It was wrapped around narratives that alternately bored me and made me uncomfortable, but it is a big mainstream testament that women are funny, and that women like funny, and women are paying just as much attention as wryly observing men to what’s going on. I am disgusted by the trend of properly MFA’d writers (Sittenfeld, as well as Meghan Daum, whose ‘Quality of Life Report’ has WAY more in common with "Good in Bed" than it does with any reasonable facsimilie of literary 20-something angst, blurbs and credentials aside) writing chick lit and then waving their degrees around and claiming they are somehow ‘better’ than it, when in many ways their literary insecurities actually hamper their efforts in the genre. Chick lit is doing some worthwhile things. To dismiss it as pure crap would be just as irresponsible and almost as dangerous as embracing it whole-heartedly.

Much more there.

*Not that there’s anything wrong with teapots.

BookWorld is full of spooktastic and Halloweeny reviews this week.

Michael Dirda looks at a new translation of Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings (from which that illo comes):

Anyone who falls under the spell of The Book of Imaginary Beings should look out for several comparable (or complementary) works. Above all, don’t miss T.H. White’s The Book of Beasts , a translation, with delightful commentary, of a 12th-century bestiary; Willy Ley’s various excursions into "romantic zoology" (starting with The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn ); Avram Davidson’s highly idiosyncratic and hard-to-find Adventures in Unhistory ; Peter Lum’s Fabulous Beasts ; Richard Carrington’s Mermaids and Mastodons ; and, not least, the grand-daddy of them all, Pliny’s Natural History (especially books 8 through 11). Here be wonders.

These are all excellent recommendations and I particularly love the Willy Ley books; hunt them down.

Oh, and Octavia Butler’s new vampire novel sounds AMAZING.