I had hoped to serve up a few more podcasts this weekend, but I’m a tad under the weather right now. So content will be lighter than usual. The Pynchon roundtable will also happen: through a more comprehensive format than I anticipated. More soon.

Lizzie Skurnick appears in today’s Style section with an article offering an overview of mommy lit, what Lizzie describes as “written in the wry voices of a generation of women who came of age after feminism, and they have a newly competitive, higher-end set of woes: $10,000 pacifier consultants, nanny-swiping and Harvard-like nursery school applications. Also present is chick-lit’s familiar cast of characters: the single best friend, the dutiful boyfriend (now husband) and a seductive other man who threatens to upset the apple cart.”

Barking Kitten takes umbrage with this, observing, “These writers are but a sliver of society, the hopelessly out-of-touch wealthy inhabiting the coasts. The article does give mention to blogs complaining about this rarified [sic] air, but the publishing world, personified by editor Stacy Creamer, who brought us masterwork The Devil Wears Prada, is all over the trend, anxious to capitalize on a strollerful of publications before the Mummies turn to divorce and menopause.”

Certainly, there have been books, including those cited in Lizzie’s article, that have attempted to capitalize on how to keep chick lit going. As those who read chick lit in the late ’90’s have started families, it makes complete sense to appeal to these new audiences, particularly if you’re an avaricious publisher. However, I must also take partial umbrage with mom lit — not because I have any objection to books which deal with mothers, but because a novel dealing with hyperaffluent maternity suggests more of a masturbatory fantasy than fiction rooted in realism. At least with chick lit, a genre which caters to valid, albeit wildly optimistic tales that often dwell upon women’s issues, there’s some sense of verisimilitude merged with fantasy. Mom lit, by contrast, involves milking the teat on a cash cow.

CNN: “Digesting that fact becomes harder when you consider that the Schuetts earn a comfortable living, with Amy, 39, pulling in $150,000 a year as a hospital psychiatrist. True, their income did take a big hit last summer when Brian got laid off from his job as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical firm (he’d been making a base salary of $82,000 a year, plus commissions as high as $24,000)….
Yet, says Amy, ‘We live from one paycheck to the next, we’re struggling to save and we never seem to have enough money to do anything fun.'”

Variety: “News Corp.-owned HarperCollins announced the news late Friday on the East Coast with a terse press release headlined ‘Judith Regan Terminated.’ Termination was effective immediately, the statement said. Move was clearly a reaction — albeit a delayed one — to the embarrassing scandal involving a Regan tome and T.V. special with O.J. Simpson titled ‘If I Did It,’ in which he described the way he would have committed the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. That event earned across-the-board condemnation and a statement from Murdoch, who called the event ‘ill-considered’ and yanked both the book and special.”

It’s a Wonderful Life in its entirety.