Everybody knows that women are the ones that buy books.  I’ve heard statistics that say that women buy upwards of 60% of all books.  But the NY Times Book Review has always been a boy’s club.  Happily, this week the section was actually readable and interesting.  It actually started on Friday with Janet Maslin’s piece The Girls of Summer.  I was psyched to add some of these books to my list especially J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement which if it is better than Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (which I loved) will be a treat.  Here’s a quote from the book:

The “Commencement” characters are savvy about, among other things, feminism and publishing. “When a woman writes a book that has anything to do with feelings or relationships, it’s either called chick lit or women’s fiction, right?” one of them asks. “But look at Updike, or Irving. Imagine if they’d been women. Just imagine. Someone would have slapped a pink cover onto ‘Rabbit at Rest,’ and poof, there goes the … Pulitzer.”

What an awesome line.

The prolific Jennifer Weiner who has a great blog and tweets too also has a new book Best Friends Forever out this summer.

Sullivan was also reviewed in the Sunday Book Review (I think she works at the Times but that should not take away from what seems to be a great book) and the main book featured on the cover was A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert.  (I love the photo they used)  The book also has feminist themes. From the review:

What is that history? What are its implications? And why should we care about them? Consider Virginia Woolf’s dictum: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” If you think this belief is dated, think again. Just two months ago, Joyce Carol Oates told The New York Times Magazine why violence is so often the subject of her fiction. “If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing,” she explained, “you would probably rather write ‘Moby-Dick’ than a little household mystery.”

And the money quote:

Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.

Makes me excited to read some good books this summer.

• Filed Under:  
• Entertainment, Books

• Tags:
• women
• New York Times
• writers
• ficiton
• janet maslin

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“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”