Hey, I won't lie. I love curling up in bed and reading about a city-girl twenty-something who has job issues, weight issues, boy issues, parent issues and frenemy issues just like I do. And the fact that there's always a happy ending complete with a handsome, successful, faithful man who has never heard of financial troubles makes me feel all warm---read: jealous---inside. Below, my six, read-them-over-and-over-again favorites.
Jemima J by Jane Green
Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella
Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
Something Blue by Emily Giffin (but read Something Borrowed first)
Baby Proof by Emily Giffin
Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty (but read Sloppy Firsts first)
A Google search confirmed that Melissa Bank's two novels, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot, are indeed "chick lit." I don't agree. They're more melancholy than, say, Confessions of a Shopaholic, so I refuse to add them to this list, despite the fact that they're two of my favorite novels. And even though it's not on here, Helen Fieldings's Bridget Jones's Diary must be hailed as the founding chick of "chick lit."
Itching to read:
Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin
(Gawd, don't you just love her color scheme?)
I started Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot the night before I left. I loved her previous (and only other novel), The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which, since its 1999 publishing date, has been made into a horrifying-looking chick flick with a different title starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. (The bright blue cover and its straight-to-DVD status doesn't make it look very promising, which is tragic.) This read was equally as melancholy yet fulfilling: Bank is stupendous at creating characters that are loveable, funny, desperate, and lost. This character, a self-deprecating, bored, rebellious, family-devoted girl named Sophie, grows before our eyes, searching for her true love and her true career. She's hilarious, and one excerpt from the book that will always stick with me is one that describes one of her flames, Bobby, and his ability to make children laugh: "He even had power over three-year-old women." Throughout the book I found myself laughing, gasping, and sighing aloud, and I even sent a text message to three of my girlfriends, telling them that I was reading a book that made me want a guy to cuddle and laugh with. Sigh (aloud). Anyway. The Wonder Spot, just like The Girl's Guide, left me hopeful, yet sad, for this wonderfully funny, delightfully awkward character.
I also read Night by Elie Wiesel last night. It was short but INTENSE. I loved it, which is hard to say because it was tragic and thus difficult to get through, but the man is a gifted writer and I couldn't help but mark the whole thing up with underlines and Post-Its and my own thoughts in the margins. (Also, it's hard to admit that I loved it because I don't even know how to pronounce his name.) Accounts like this really do make you wonder: how could people this cruel have existed only 70 years ago, in the twentieth century? How was this going on under the noses of everyone? How could people have been tortured this way? Only 70 years ago? "This isn't the Middle Ages," Wiesel said to his father. And I could not help but be as mystified as he was. And though the entire Auschwitz experience is devastating, I must admit to myself that the terrible men who killed and delighted in death are forever interesting to me. I just saw The Counterfeiters, which affected me in the same regard. How can any man delight in the torture of other men? Women? Children and infants? How did these men grow up to hate---or rather, not hate, but feel INDIFFERENT toward---the violently victimized men and women of this era? How did that happen?
Anyway. On a COMPLETE 180 note, I am now reading French Women Don't Get Fat.