Forgive me for injecting this note of sadness, but I'm mourning the death today of my friend Eden Ross Lipson. Eden was for a long while the children's book editor of the New York Times. I knew her after she retired. She e-mailed me one day a few years ago about a piece I wrote on reading books to boys that are usually given to girls, like Little House in the Big Woods. I'd just started writing about kids and motherhood, and I felt the opposite of confident about whether I had much to say worth hearing. Eden's brisk e-mail made smarter points than mine. But she didn't point that out. She offered suggestions for the next piece, the best kind of deft encouragement. From then on, she wrote when she wanted to tell me I'd gotten a children's book right, or when I'd gotten it wrong. She suggested topics. She became my literary fairy godmother.

I met Eden in person last summer, when I went to consult with her about the germ of an idea that has turned into the new website we launched today. Eden gave me peach tea, if I remember right, shooed her husband off on a walk, and reeled off the names of potential reviewers and contributors. To my delight, she said yes when I asked if she might herself contribute to the new site. Oh yes, she wanted to write about lost books—the ones that go out of print or fall out of favor but shouldn't. "Here are four that come to mind," she wrote in a follow-up e-mail. She continued:

"Tell Me a Mitzi by Lore Segal—a splendid picture book about childhood incident and ritual story telling with strange, haunting illustrations.

The Doll's House by Rumer Godden—a post World War II children's novel about the arbitrary but abiding nature of a family... in this case the dolls who get to live in a restored doll's house. The plain, simple farthing doll embodies courage and bravery, another is both beautiful and evil.

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher—an old-fashioned, but always timely, "women's novel" about stereotyped role playing in marriage. The first chapters capture the frenzy and despair of a stay-at-home wife who should be out at work brilliantly.

The American Table by Ronald Johnson—a truly great cookbook published in 1983 by a man better known in another world as an outstanding American poet. (On the basis of a tribute at Poets House in New York in 2006 I think it's fair to say the poets don't know he wrote cookbooks, the cooks have never read the poetry.) The hundreds of recipes from all over the country are deceptively simple and easy and charmingly sourced, collected from old ladies, pamphlets, friends and traditions. The Shaker vegetables are a special treat. He wrote four other cookbooks, all worth having nearby."

I am so sorry that I won't get to read those pieces. Eden took children's books as seriously as they are meant to be taken. If we are very lucky, and at our very best, that spirit will infuse Double X. And still I will miss her.

Tags: Eden Ross Lipson; children's books

Over at Seed, Josh Rosenau describes his organization's long, failed attempt to get the Texas School Board to adopt evolution-friendly standards for the state's textbooks. Much as I'd like to, I cannot get exercised over this issue; my own public, and later parochial, elementary education was full of so much misinformation (America will run out of landfills by the year 1990! Marijuana kills! New York City is the capital of New York!) that my expectations remain unflappably low.

What I find more interesting is how such a narrow group of political actors effectively controls a wide swath of the the textbook market. Given the size of the state, publishers are likely to tailor their books to conform to the standards set by Texas; the same books are then sold to smaller states, so millions of non-Texan kids read what Texas tells them to read. Or, more precisely, what the 15 people on the Texas School Board tell them to read. Seven of those 15 are creationists, one of whom was moved to shout, during recent hearings, "Someone's got to stand up to the experts!" Mission accomplished.

Tags: evolution, public schools, Texas

Back in January, a bunch of copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight arrived in the Philippines, and a customs official demanded an import duty. It’s illegal to tax books in the Philippines—no such duty had been levied in 50 years—but the Twilight importer paid up. The Bureau of Customs, apparently facing a budget shortfall, began to demand the impromptu tax for every new air shipment of books. Importers refused to pay, so huge numbers of textbooks and novels waited in warehouses. For months, virtually no imported books got past the blockade.

Robin Hemley, who runs the MFA program in which I am enrolled, wrote a very funny dispatch on the situation in McSweeney’s. He expected few people to pay attention; stories of corruption in the Philippines surprise virtually no one.

But an illegal tax on books has a different emotional impact than a tax on clothes or computers. Enraged bloggers, clued in by Hemley's column, felt that their access to knowledge was being restricted by petty officials. Filipino media outlets picked up the story with headlines like "A New Age of Ignorance" and “A Nation of Idiots.” Neil Gaiman tweeted. The U.N. got involved. And after weeks of Internet-fueled protest, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself stepped in to finally free the books.

Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves.

Yup, that's right, Amish romance novels exist, and they're popular. So popular that two of them, part of The Sisters of the Quilt trilogy by Cindy Woodsmall, have been on the New York Times bestseller list. The extremely chaste Quilt series (there's one kiss in the whole series) seems to follow the standard script, except in the specifics (no electricity etc.). Hannah Lapp, a 17-year-old Amish girl, falls for a Mennonite (the Montague to her Capulet), and drama, romance, and tragedy ensue. The sub-genre even has a nickname: "bonnet books."

Why isn't the existence of bonnet books common knowledge? Or, put another way, why are romance novels still so ghettoized? They're hugely popular, accounting for 32 percent of mass-market fiction sold. Sales were up seven percent at the end of 2008, even while other book sales have plummeted due to the recession. Sure, some are terribly written, but a high ratio of junk to quality hasn't stopped us from taking television, comic books, and video games seriously. In a recent piece on the history of Harlequin, The Walrus posited that romance novels are to women what porn is to men: We spend a lot more time talking, thinking, and arguing about porn than we ever have romance novels. Speaking to NPR, the two women who run the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog, a site on a mission to rescue the romance novel's rep, theorized that overt female sexuality and desire makes people uncomfortable. (A less positive gloss was provided by Andrea Dworkin, who said the books are "rape embellished with meaningful looks.") What do you all think? Anyone want to start a book club for When The Heart Cries?

Tags: Amish, Bonnet Books, Romance novels

Nora Roberts has written 182 novels. Last year alone she sold 8 million copies of her new romance titles, 5.5 million books off her backlist, and 4.5 million copies of her mystery books. Her work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 700 weeks, but she’s been reviewed in its pages only once. This week Lauren Collins at The New Yorker throws Roberts a highbrow lifeline in the form of a charming, funny profile that fully convinced me 1) I should read a Nora Roberts book and 2) I really want to hang out with Nora Roberts.

There are clear sociological motivations for reading Roberts (one in five readers is reading romance; Roberts is the Goliath of romance; she sold 17 million books last year, almost all, one assumes to American women), but Collins makes the case, without ever overselling, that Roberts' books might not be totally devoid of artistic merit. Her novels will always have a relatable main character, always have a plot, always include sex (sez Roberts, “Sex is important in the books because, without it, it would be like eating a rice cake instead of a cupcake”), and, most compellingly, contain dialogue that could be delivered by Hepburn-Tracy, Grant-Russell, or Hepburn-Grant, e.g. “I’ve decided to hate you.” “Oh? Again?" and “I’m informed that you and the deceased had a relationship.” “What we had was sex.” Snap, crackle, pop.

More charming even than these screwball exchanges is Roberts herself, who comes across as a down-to-earth, foul-mouthed, self-deprecating, extremely grounded, extremely disciplined woman whose key commandment of writing is “Ass in the chair.” This may not help turn a girl into Proust, but I think I’m going to tape it on my refrigerator anyway. Roberts also has advice for Susan Orlean, who Twittered last week about the trials and tribulations of being a working, writing-from-home mom. With respect to her own kids, Roberts' rule was, “Don’t bother me unless it’s blood or fire. And, as they grew more responsible, arterial blood and active fire.” Arterial blood! I need to go start a Nora Roberts book, stat.

Tags: Nora Roberts, Romance novels

I think you're right, Meghan, to point out the disconnect in Leah Hager Cohen's NYT book review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women. I love Walbert's writing—she was my beloved fiction teacher in college, she gave me a copy of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, and I always see a connection between her beautiful, spare, every-word-counts prose and Robinson's.

I do think, though, that there is a degree of narrowcasting in some of Walbert's work. Our Kind, her last novel, was about a small group of women who occupy a privileged WASPY world. A Short History of Women, which I haven't read yet, appears to tread the same terrain. (The Gardens of Kyoto, Walbert's first novel, is a little different because it pulls in the Underground Railroad and the Korean War.) I tentatively introduce the idea of narrowcasting not as a synonym for "miniature"—as you pointed out over lunch today, Updike's characters occupy a similar social stratum, and no one goes around accusing him of being small. Instead, my point is that critics and reviewers confine some writers to the worlds they create and let others roam. I suppose we could come up with some criteria for whose canvas most evokes distant peaks. And we also have to recognize which peaks we're primed to see. I also wonder if reviewers simply dismiss short books as small ones—a bias you've also deconstructed, and which always strikes me as especially misguided. In any case, I can't wait to read this new book and absorb its large truths.

Tags: kate walbert, new york times, women novelists

Ask and ye shall receive. Just yesterday, some of us here at Double X were waxing nostalgic for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and lo: Today, Salon book critic Laura Miller offers a run-down of "urban fantasy" novels whose heroines would make our dear, departed, demon-killing California girl proud. Among others, Miller discusses the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris (basis for the HBO series True Blood) and the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton.

"Urban fantasy" ends up being a bit of a slippery genre. At one point, Miller calls it "a cross of fairy tale, noir and classic coming-of-age narrative." There's sex and romance aplenty—though in varying ratios, depending on the series in question—but the stories generally avoid the pat, happily-ever-after endings usually found in romance novels. In Miller's depiction, the books are delicious but also nutritious—perfect for those nights "when my brain is just too weary for Ian McEwan but not soft enough to settle for The Mentalist.

Sign me up.

Besides being an excellent service piece—thanks for mapping out my summer reading list, Laura!—the essay also offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways we categorize art, particularly pulpy "genre" art, and art that's by (or for) women. Urban fantasy novels are sometimes called "paranormal romances," a term that, as Miller shows, can be wielded with a sneer. Snobbery sucks, but I'm hardly one to throw stones—I'd heard that label before, and even though I'm a big fan of both of those constituent elements (demons? sex? what's not to like?), I never really bothered to check out the offerings. Thank god, then, for critics like Miller, who know how to make us feel good about eating our candy.

Photograph of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar by Getty Images.

Tags: anita blake, buffy the vampire slayer, laura miller, Romance novels, sookie stackhouse

Author J. Robert Lennon has a very amusing and delightfully honest story in the Los Angeles Times, "The Truth About Writers," that answers any gnawing questions you may have had regarding exactly what writers are doing with all that time in which they claim to be writing. Writing? Mmmm. Not exactly. In fact, most of their writing time is spent ... not writing.

Certainly, some of us Double Xers have spent our time instead, as Lennon notes of himself and others, belly-aching about the fact that if only we had more time, if only we had more money, heck, if only we had a sugar daddy, we would write, write more, write until someone tried to stop us.

During a four-hour "writing session," Lennon finds he spent a grand total of 33 minutes actually writing. "What this means is that, even at my absolute peak of productivity," he notes, "I am actively writing less than 5 percent of the time." Based on his findings, he wonders if he should even call himself a writer. More fitting job descriptions: "eater," "sleeper," "naked girl imaginer," "child reprimander," "cougher."

He concludes that writers "have invented 'writing time' as a normalizing concept, to shield ourselves from the critical scrutiny we deserve." Tragically, that sounds about right. At least, to this ... uh, "writer."

Photograph of woman not writing by Getty Images.

Tags: sugar daddies, writers

A guest post from Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From On High.

At every public appearance I make, someone raises his hand and says something like, “It’s much harder to be a tall woman than a tall man, right?” This point of view was echoed in the current issue of The New Yorker: A story about the director Nora Ephron opens with a quote about being tall from Meryl Streep, who is playing 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the forthcoming movie Julie & Julia. "I mean, it's like having club foot ... it was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born," Streep says.

Yes, being tall has its challenges. I know, I'm 6-foot-3. But at its heart, the constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be public, the constant sense of walking around with a spotlight on you. There's no place to hide, and that's genderless. Tall men are every bit as self-conscious as tall women.

Tall women’s struggles are more subtle. You’re not aware of this unless you’re tall, but there’s a vortex of silence around tall female public figures, and a total dearth of tall female role models. Sure, there are lots of very successful tall women out there. But you probably don’t know who they are. Because they don't talk about it.

No one really knew how tall Julia Child was until Meryl Streep started talking about it.

Tall girls look around and have two role model choices: Sarah, Plain and Tall (note that she’s plain and tall, not tall and awesome), and Janet Reno, being portrayed by a man on Saturday Night Live. It’s not inspirational.

There are few tall women saying, “I’m tall, I love it, this is beautiful,” because tall public figures, including more than a few top WNBA and tennis stars, steer away from their height during interviews because they—understandably—want to be seen for more than their bodies. (Note: Yes, I know that models are tall. But there's a pivotal issue of mass here that changes the experience.)

What messages do slip through are incredibly negative. In the last few weeks, beyond Streep comparing it to a disability: 6-foot Brooke Shields told Health that she’s sad that she waited to lose her virginity until age 22 because she was uncomfortable in her body, and 5-foot-10 Blake Lively told Allure that she, “feels like a tranny a lot of the time. I just feel really big a lot of the time, and I’m surrounded by a lot of tiny people. I feel like a man sometimes.”

Really, height has nothing to do with manliness. Nothing. That’s like associating overweight women with manliness because men tend to weigh more. The trouble is that by not talking about it, us tall women have left space for others to define it. And in our silence, tall women have been very sexualized by popular culture, often portrayed as manly and aggressive (see the amazing poster for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, or any of Perez Hilton’s commentary on tall lady celebs—whom he calls manly she-men).

I think it’s important for us tall women to speak up and portray ourselves as we’d like to be portrayed as gorgeous and lovely and wonderful, and set culture’s idea of tall women by defining it ourselves by talking about it as much as possible, wherever relevant, very loudly. Like right here.

Photograph of Julia Child at her 90th birthday celebration by Thomas J. Gibbons/Getty Images.

Tags: arianne cohen, julia child, the tall book

On Monday Double X published an excerpt from Lizzie Skurnick's new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I've since found myself paging back through my own copy of her ode to the young adult novel. In the office earlier today, Noreen and I were discussing what the book suggests about why women read. We thought others might want to chime in here.

Skurnick's thesis, which she defends with her usual contagious exuberance, is that books like Daughters of Eve, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Jacob Have I Loved are important, that their companionship can be the thing that keeps you from dissolving into a pool of self-doubt before you ever get to kiss someone or get your own apartment or write a book. What she never explicitly acknowledges is that the authors and protagonists of most of the novels she discusses are female, and that she is writing specifically about how these books shape their readers as women. Certainly many male writers have reflected in print on the books that shaped them as thinkers, writers, and human beings. Do we have an example, though, of a man talking about the stories that showed him how to make it as a man? Which once again raises the larger question: Do men think of their maleness as being a distinct, challenging aspect of their humanity, as women must to at least some degree (see the prehistoric maxi-pad-with-belt in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret) regard being female?

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery