Chick lit readers of the world, unite!

I always thought of Bridget Jones and the rest of her high-strung, bad-office-work, good-wardrobe spawn as my dirty little secret. My sister and I bought the books in bulk and traded them back and forth. While a few stood out, most of them blended together into one, easy-to-read romp. With their hipster cover illustruations of young, naive but ready for sex-and-shopping heroines, they took us away faster than any legal rush.

But it turns out, reading these books is a feminist statement. Well, not in this country, but definitely in India, where, according to the New York Times Book Review piece, The Chick-Lit Pandemic, they are snapping up their version of Bridget Jones. (By the way, pandemic seems to be stretching the term just a bit. We're not talking bird flu and it's not really dangerous, unless social unrest can really be traced back to Shopholic Takes Manhattan. . . it does give the genre a patina of breathless urgency -- what, we women, hysterical?)

In Russia, Poland and Hungary, this vision of the single woman making her own decisions and shopping up a storm is as good a rallying cry as any. Anything that feels that naughty has got to be stirring up the populace somewhere. Chick lit fans, all you have to lose are your Birkenstocks.