What to Read Before Brunch
Talking about YA entertainment empires, the staying power of Barnes & Noble, Bridgerton, and more.
Welcome to Amateur Bibliotherapy, my newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown.
We’ve made it to April, one of my favorite months of the year! It is just warm enough to take long walks without breaking too much of a sweat, but still cool enough to keep me temperate and happy while wearing cozy clothes and reading in the sun.
I am sending this newsletter out before celebrating my father’s birthday (which is actually today—happy birthday, dad!) and therefore leaving you with some articles to occupy your time waiting for a brunch table or something. I’ve provided articles of varying lengths to accommodate your queue time.
The Articles
You Know You Love Me: ‘Gossip Girl’ and the Tween YA Explosion of the 2000s, The Ringer (~19 min).
I am duty-bound to discuss any article that delves into the YA properties that made up my young life. This one focuses on the business structure and products of Alloy Entertainment, a book packaging company that develops ”book ideas in-house with the aim to supplement sales by licensing film and TV rights, which it would control by retaining the IP.” Alloy is responsible for the books and subsequent on-screen adaptations of Gossip Girl, The Clique, The It Girl, Pretty Little Liars, The Vampire Diaries, and many more; they generally developed stories that were bitchy, dramatic, and deeply materialistic, “with implicit values [that] were very much of their Bush-era, pre-recessionary time.”
With its libertine attitudes, cosmopolitan setting, and convivial narrator, Gossip Girl evoked the smash hit Sex and the City, which helped turn HBO into a powerhouse in the late ’90s. Meanwhile, Pretty Little Liars originated with a pitch from one of Alloy’s TV executives, who wanted to make a play on Desperate Housewives for teens; The Clique started when Josh Bank, now Alloy’s East Coast entertainment president, wondered what it might look like if Tony Soprano were a middle-school girl. Alloy had exploded around the same era television began to reorient itself around unrepentant antiheroes, teaching audiences not to expect or even enjoy model behavior from their protagonists. It was only a matter of time until Alloy’s characters joined their ranks.
Not only was I obsessed with Alloy’s products as a youngster, but I squealed in delight just a few weeks ago when I walked right past people filming scenes in the new Gossip Girl reboot by my office. Some joys take root.
Two Indian half-sisters are the talk of 'Bridgerton' — and of modern-day India, too, NPR (~9 min). I thought season two of Bridgerton was fine at best, but I did appreciate the scenes between sisters Kate and Edwina (since the enemies-to-lovers slow burn and love triangle with Anthony was… weird). This article discusses how “two brown-skinned women are the talk of [Bridgerton’s] 19th century England… [and] 21st century India as well.”
A Bookstore Revival Channels Nostalgia for Big Box Chains, Bloomberg CityLab (~7 min). Though hand-wringing oldsters have been declaring bookstores dead for what feels like eons, it appears that mall bookstores are experiencing a bit of a renaissance.
Why do we have nostalgia for these shops that were, by many rubrics, worse than the bookstores we have now? More generic, more plastic, less curated, less authentic. Because those bookstores were never just about books — they were about access, and freedom. The chains reached deeper into America, and brought books to a wider demographic, than today’s approximately 6,000 stores can. Yes, we have Amazon now. But it will never be the same as sitting on the carpet in some under-trafficked aisle and reading your first Sweet Valley High, your first Stephen King, or your first biography of The Great One.
As a teenager, I regularly situated myself in the stacks of Manhasset’s Barnes & Noble, sprawled on gone-to-seed carpet while feverishly reading various Hunger Games rip-offs instead of buying them with my precious allowance. With drab walls decorated in a fashion indistinguishable from strip mall counterpart Panera Bread and towers of cellophane-d merchandise hiding disheveled troughs of steeply discounted books, Barnes & Noble inadvertently struck the balance of being a nice enough spot to curl up for a little bit, while being just grime-y enough to keep you moving in order to avoid smelling weird.
While independent bookstores have recently resurged because of their dedication to community-oriented spaces and curated literary choices, Barnes & Noble’s extreme non-specificity made it a welcome place to hide in plain sight while deciding which weird books will shape your mind. This article digs into what this kind of environment can look like for 2022 shoppers and readers.
How Perfume Becomes an Evocative Clue for Mystery Writers, Literary Hub (~7 min). My favorite books tend to utilize the five senses in unique ways, whether that means getting really specific about the tastes of different foods or the smells that designate a scene or character. This article talks about how perfume in particular gets used in the mystery genre, often to tacitly define villains and heroes.
The Books
In the spirit of keeping this edition short and sweet, I will simply inform you that, since last we spoke, I finished A Molecule Away From Madness by Sara Manning Peskin; The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein; and A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy Lin. I am currently reading You Can’t Be Serious by Kal Penn (!) and a few other things. More thoughts on those and more to come.
Catch ya later!