A good friend of mine here in the U.K. has taken on an insanely demanding job working as a manager for the National Health Service. She isn’t the type to complain — and I think she does actually enjoy the work — but the stress and long hours have had a notable effect on her leisure habits. When she watches TV, she wants short, upbeat programs like Scrubs. When it comes to online videos, she wants to watch hilariously cranky turtles chasing cats. And when it comes to reading, she wants to slip back into the literary equivalent of comfort food: girls’ books, and most particularly the girls’ books she read when she was growing up.

All this Anne-of-Green-Gablesing has got me thinking about the girls’ books I used to read as a kid. Here are some of my favorite examples of the most popular genres.

1. The Ballet and Stage School Books

At the risk of having my queer card taken away, I have to admit that I loved these books. I went on dreaming that I was going to be a ballerina long after I’d given up actual ballet lessons. And I still love watching ballet, musicals and contemporary dance, even if I’ve reluctantly come to realize that, truthfully, I find standing by the barre for hours and doing exercises a little boring.

The British writer Noel Streatfeild, author of Ballet Shoes, is, obviously, one of the queens of this genre. As an early teen, though, the ballet books that I loved (and that my father relentlessly teased me for loving) were Jean Estoril’s Drina books.

If you’ve read this series — which is eleven books long, and follows Drina Adams from her first ballet lessons at age nine, to her triumphant debut as lead ballerina with a major company, plus wedding at age 18 (which seems awfully young, in retrospect, for such a major commitment) — you’ll know that she dances everywhere: in Exile, in Paris, in Italy, in Madeira, in New York, in Switzerland. Yes, these books are schlocky. But in their defense, the author was obviously a well-traveled woman who loved the places she was writing about — and she did give me a long-standing taste for travel, even if not for ballet classes.

If all this talk of ballet gives you a rash, though, there are always what might be called the anti-ballet-book ballet books: Jahnna N. Malcolm’s Bad News Ballet series, about five girls who loathe the ballet classes they are forced into, and who refer to their snobby, skinny, ballet-mad classmates as “the Bunheads.”

2. The Horse Books

No doubt Freud would have something to say about the popularity of “pony books” for girls, but whatever he had to say, I doubt it would apply to me. I was never actually that interested in horses in and of themselves — which is just as well, since my parents couldn’t have afforded a pony if I’d wanted one. But there were a few horse-themed books that I enjoyed. One was National Velvet, which — besides being made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor — is actually a really good, genuinely literary novel, about a strange, spacey girl called Velvet and her strong, silent mother who once swam the English Channel. … continue reading

Given the Broadway stagehands strike, I thought I wouldn't be doing much theater blogging this week. But, of course, theater is not all about Broadway. And Siege amply reminded of that when she made my day by passing along an exciting bit of musical theater news: The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis will be producing the world premiere of Little House on the Prairie, a musical based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The show is scheduled to open during the summer of 2008.

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I'm cautiously optimistic about this project. For one thing, the creative team seems pretty amazing.