Paris Review editor-in-chief Lorin Stein entered the Franzenfreude fracas early on, with a piece on the Atlantic’s Web site arguing that Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult’s call for critics to “spend more time celebrating mass-market novels” was a kind of “fake populism” that “pretends to speak for women (as if women weren't the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men).” Weiner

I dunno, Amanda, if the anecdotal "men get to the remote control first" really cuts it here, or explains much about why women read more books. Your point that boys grow up reading less probably has more to it, given what we know about how boys and girls tend to learn.

A couple of days ago the New York Times' sports section reported on the fascinating saga of Dorothy Jane Mills, who, for several decades beginning around 1950, assisted her husband, the historian Harold Seymour, in writing a three-volume scholarly history of baseball. More than assisted: She co-wrote it, but received little recognition at the time and, it would seem, precious little thanks from her husband.

KJ: I want to second your point about the problem with creating “rating systems” for teen and preteen books. I was never a fan of TV ratings (though recent episodes of Gossip Girl may have led me to reverse my position!), but I’m really not a fan of book rating. As you astutely point out, reading graphic language is not the same thing as seeing graphic footage. For one thing, books are far more subjective a medium, I would argue: To me, sexual language is more subjective than sexual images are.

By way of the NYT's book blog comes this question from January magazine: Should kids' books be rated? Novelist Tony Buchsbaum was reading a review copy of a new YA novel, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, containing this riveting IM exchange:

A New Year's gift from Scholastic! The publisher is bringing back The Babysitters Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial young girls that more or less taught me how to read. Scholastic is re-issuing the first two books in the 213-title series—you read that right: 213—as well as a prequel.

For their 2006 book Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes, Lyn Mikel Brown and Sharon Lamb, both professors, waded through the pink muck of girl culture.

Hi folks! Long time no blog—remember me? I knew I'd really dropped the ball when I read this from a friend:

"Honey, your Dream House is turning into a recurring nightmare; one where I keep checking for updates and keep getting disappointed."

In the latest edition of the DoubleX Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and The New Yorker's Margaret Talbot discuss A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book.

"I will do something by and by," Louisa May Alcott wrote as an adult in the voice of her youthful self. "I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't."