readin'

I still feel a little guilty about reading (and friggin' loving) the first three books in the Twilight series. I've come to my senses and won't be reading the fourth (unless tragedy strikes my life, in which case Breaking Dawn is the third thing I'll turn to, after booze and pills), but I still feel like a hypocrite. Because if I had daughters, I'd hate for them to read those misogynistic, abstinence-promoting, no-good-female-role-models Twilight books.

So I was glad to find this list of 10 Best Books for Girls and Young Women. It really is a good list: I've read seven of the ten (many of them have been around since I was a lass), and they're among my childhood and grownup favorites: The Chronicles of Prydain, the Madeleine L'Engle books, His Dark Materials...

And speaking of lists, my friend J Quizzle has been inadvertently compiling a list of the Best Books for Nearing-Middle-Age Women. The last three things I've read have all been at his suggestion (I'm not counting Goldengrove, which I didn't make past page 100), and they've all been good. So I was about to call him from the bookstore today (sadly, a Borders, but I'm in Florida, after all) to ask WWJR? when I remembered that he had recommended Rock Springs awhile back.

I resisted when he suggested it, mostly because trying get through the first 100 pages of The Sportswriter made me sick on testosterone, but I'm less than one story into Rock Springs, and already it's proving my theory that the '80s were a good decade for books, if nothing else.

So what's next on the list, J Quizzle? Tell me soon, lest I end up taking quaaludes and trying to decide whether I'm on Team Edward or Team Jacob. Actually, that doesn't sound like a bad way to spend a Vermont winter afternoon...