Something for the ladies...

I’m a little later than usual posting this week because I have been in Turin, Italy for some internal meetings. This is the last trip of the summer! Whoo hoo!

I bought A Thousand Splendid Suns to read this trip. But you know what? I’m just not up for it right now. I read the first couple of chapters and just can’t read it. I loved Kite Runner. It was beautifully written (if not a little indulgent in sometimes painting the characters in an almost cartoonish representation of good and evil). I cried through most of it. It's lovely and devastating and heart crushing and I couldn’t put it down. I really do want to read the new book and I will get around to it this summer, but for this trip I think I needed something a little less intense. Unfortunately, I read my People and US Weekly in the first hour of the flight over and my only options in Italy were…well…in Italian.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with reading some light fluffy romantic comedy chick lit every once in awhile (for the boys I would draw the equivalent as science fiction or Tom Clancy). Some variation of a girl, who is a bit zany or wacky and can’t find a man, has some fatal flaw like uncontrollable spending or shopping habits, meets a guy and eventually, after some missteps they fall in love and meet happily ever after. Sound familiar? The English lit major in me can’t help but recall Shakespeare and Austen. Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Pride and Prejudice basically invented the formula: woman appears strong and independent (with requisite clutzy or goofy quirk), meets man they are drawn to but pretends to despise and then by some great twist of fate or design they end up together and live happily ever after.

So in celebration of my last business trip of the summer here are my some of favourite light, mindless, chick lit books (in no particular order):

Bridget Jones Diary (no interest in the second one)
Confessions of a Shopaholic (the first one is very cute, but the rest of the series got boring quickly)
I Don’t Know How She Does It (for the working super mom – especially the opening description of the tarts – hysterical)
The Nanny Diaries (read on maternity leave so was appropriate timing as well as good for my mush brain)
The Devil Wears Prada (thought the movie sucked though Meryl Streep & Stanley Tucci nailed it)
Pride & Prejudice ( The grandmammy of them all. As a companion piece, the A&E mini-series starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy should be absolutely mandatory.)

Thanks for posting your comments, I appreciate all of your suggestions and I'll start to respond to them now that I have figured it out :-).