Though I love the TV show, Candace Bushnell’s book Sex and the City is very dull. I actually read it long before I ever started watching the show – in fact, that’s why I held out for so long. You know how you read a fantastic book and then are often disappointed by the book? [...]

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was not only the first guy lit book I ever read, it also preceded my discovery of chick lit by a couple of years. I was living in Paris in the summer of 96 and reading my way through the bookshelf of the British woman whose studio I was subletting. I [...]

Marian Keyes, the queen of Irish chick lit, delved into the serious subject of drug addiction in her third book, Rachel’s Holiday, but managed an amazing job of mixing those horror stories with romance and humor. The end result is a wonderful book about another of the Walsh sisters – it’s funny and sad, serious [...]

Last Chance Saloon is Marian Keyes’s first novel told from multiple third-person points of view. It’s the story of old friends and new loves, growing up and seeing people for who they really are. Between the hair-obsessed actor and the woman who learns that it’s ok to need someone, it will make you laugh and [...]

Joan Conway’s Cereal Lover is probably one of the least-known great chick lit novels. The writing style is very similar to Marian Keyes’s* and the story is a little nutty, but that just makes it more fun. This is one of my favorite books – it’s a quick, funny read.
*So much so that for a [...]

Is there anything more fun than reminiscing about old movies with new friends? In Looking for Andrew McCarthy, Jenny Colgan not only offers a great chick lit novel (girl gets dumped and goes on an impossible quest across the US), but also a look back at all those brat pack movies that I loved (and [...]

One of the earliest chick lit books, The Trials of Tiffany Trott, by Isabel Wolff, is also one of the most fun. Tiffany is 37 and still looking for Mr. Right in a quest that leads her to classified ads, blind dates, Club Med, and pretty much anywhere else single men might conceivably hang out. [...]

I love, love, love Marian Keyes’s Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married. Though it’s not perfect (see spoilers, below), I enjoy the story and particularly certain scenes so much that I’m still able to reread it regularly and enjoy it just as much each time I do. I really like Lucy, and overall the book is [...]

It’s set in New York, but I would definitely classify Just Friends, by Robyn Sisman, as English chick lit. Either way, the whole book is fun and there are a couple of truly hilarious scenes. The characters and, more importantly, the various mix-ups and misunderstandings are believable, which makes them all the funnier. This is [...]

Though I don’t care at all about Kung Fu, I loved Karen Brichoux’s Coffee and Kung Fu. The (brief) comparisons to martial arts movies are fun and even interesting, but it’s the author’s descriptions and dialogues that really make this book stand out. One line in particular, which I can’t remember exactly so I won’t [...]