Lit hits

Book lovers used to talk about things literary but now the literature word itself is being chunked down into 'lit' genres... as in chick-lit, that disparaging little term used for lightweight reads aimed at women. No attention is ever paid to how hard it is to actually write an engaging, lightweight read. Never mind, also, the big money such books make for the publishers. Women are, after all the major buyers of books and popular fiction does best of all. Despite that, chick-lit is considered by critics to be fluff and therefore mockable. I hear farm-lit (also known a rural-lit)is very popular in Australia, where they love novels set in places where there’s lots of open space, grass and animals. Dinner at Rose’s – written by New Zealand vet Danielle Hawkins is a case in point, just published in Australia and new Zealand. And the other day I got introduced, via Bitch Magazine to priv-lit – standing for self-help books. Priv-lit, suggest Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Browooks, is a first-world kind of con-job because poor people in real need of help don’t have time (or money) for reading about self-help; they’re too damn busy trying to survive. Good point, gals! In other words, it’s only the privileged who have the luxury of taking time out to spend money on 'finding themselves'. For an example of priv-lit look at the immensely popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which Joshunda and Diana suggests could just as well have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White. Interesting that these 'lit' genres are all books for women. Nowhere yet have I seen mention of footy-lit, fish-lit or auto-lit. 'Bout time, isn't it?

Office affairs - oh, the angst!

Lucy Kellaway is a Financial Times columnist. I first got to know her via her voice in the witty little pieces about business life that she records for the BBC.
Turns out she's a good novelist as well. I just read her In Office Hours and can highly recommend it for a holiday read. Or a curled-up-on-the- couch read. You might label it 'chick lit' if it wasn't Lucy at the helm, but she overcomes what could be a standard office-affairs theme by being really dry, witty and droll...in her inimitable manner. In Office Hours is office politics writ large, set against the backdrop of London City machinations, the GFC, and corporate and banking greed. Ironically - for she must have written it before the Gulf oil spill and the tarnishing of BP's reputation - it is set within the head office of a rapacious oil company that she tags Atlantic Energy.
She has two main characters who are (slightly annoyingly) called Stella and Bella, but you quickly get to grips with their linked but separate dramas.
Stella is the senior exec appalled to find herself having it off with a junior, many-years-younger male assistant; Bella is the struggling junior office assistant and solo mum feeling the tug of illicit excitement with her male, much-older married boss. Kellaway niftily exposes the different tensions and attitudes evoked by these unequal relationships.
It's agonising and funny, all at the same time, and accompanied by the churning of feverish emails and texts. Which is of course the modern, and often hazardous way.
It also points out how damn annoying Microsoft can be. There's Stella, struggling to write an emotionally laden email that's ripping her heart out, when up pops a smarmy on-screen message from the 'assistant' - "it looks like you're trying to write a letter. Would you like help?"