Citizen Reader

I don't know what's up with me. I've been thinking a lot about cornfields (as you know), and the farm, and the country. So I wrote this:

At the End of the Road: Postcard from Wisconsin

This thought cycle is due, at least in part, from my experience reading Sarah Smarsh's spectacular book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Growing Up Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. It's stupendous. If you haven't read it yet, please do so.

Thank you all for another wonderful year of reading with me. Let's go forth and find some new books to chat over in 2020. Have a peaceful season of whatever it is you celebrate and we'll see you on the other side of this decade, all right? And remember to  keep your stick on the ice--we're all in this together.

I really miss good "chick lit" novels.

I know, I'm of an age now where I'm supposed to enjoy Women's Fiction. But I DO NOT ENJOY Women's Fiction. (Unless it's by Anne Tyler.) I don't know why this is. Perhaps because I need fiction to take me away from the world, and reading Women's Fiction makes me feel like I'm trapped in small talk at our school's Parent Teacher Organization. I do not really need any more of that.

Two cases in point: I tried to read Susan Gloss's novel The Curiosities, and I just got about thirty pages in to Kelly Harms's The Overdue Life of Amy Byler.* I did not enjoy either of them. These are not bad books, and I actually remember reading and liking Susan Gloss's first novel Vintage. But these books are not for me.

So here's what I need: suggestions for some good chick lit. (You know, Bridget Jones's Diary, etc.) Failing that, I need some suggestions for good novels that are not "literary" (read: by a man who talks obsessively about masturbation or that critics think write women characters very well: I'm looking at you, Sam Lipsyte and Nickolas Butler) but are also NOT Women's Fiction in any way, shape, or form.

Thank you for any suggestions!

*I got a total laugh out of the Kirkus review of this book, particularly this line: "Amy heads off to New York, where she delivers a presentation at a library educators’ conference and has first-date sex with "hot librarian" Daniel Seong-Eason." I think if you'd ever been to a library conference (and I have) you'd laugh at every part of that sentence. But maybe that's just me.