Reading Tom Perotta's latest novel, "The Abstinence Teacher," gave me the same comforted feeling that watching an hour-long HBO drama about someone else's dysfunctional family always does. Sure, we live in an America where some people are benighted religious loons, where teenaged children hate their parents, where the denial runs as deep as the cynicism. But at least everyone is attractive, in a well-lit, fresh-scrubbed way, and at least everyone's romance storyline has a chance of working out! This book is about Ruth, a divorced, mom-hot small town sex ed teacher who balks at teaching her school district's new abstinence based curriculum, and Tim, a divorced, dad-hot druggie deadbeat dad turned born-again Christian who feels Ruth's wrath after leading her teen daughter's soccer team in prayer. Sounds like these two have a lot to teach each other about religion, politics, and, why, who knows what else! It's a testament to Tom's considerable skill at keeping the machine of a novel humming briskly along that these somewhat predictable proceedings stay interesting until the closing credits. Uh, acknowledgments page, rather.

Shalom Auslander sees himself as a foreskin—"unwanted, cut off, bloodied, tossed aside"—because of his repressive ultra-religious upbringing among the Orthodox Jews of Monsey, New York. This tortured and, let's face it, icky metaphor underlies all the stories in 'The Foreskin's Lament,' which is about Shalom's struggle to come to terms with a nasty, vindictive, stickler of a God who, much to his chagrin, he still sorta believes in. Weirdly, I was reminded of 'A Million Little Pieces' while reading 'The Foreskin's Lament'—it is an addiction memoir, of a sort. A 'this is how I manfully dealt with my terrible addiction' memoir. Sucks for Shalom that the drug he's trying to kick is the sick thrill of worrying desperately that some omnipresent deity cares enough about what you eat and how you surgically alter your child's genitalia to punish you for screwing it up.

I had been meaning to read 'The Female Thing' ever since it got enthusiastic but skeptical lady-peer reviews. Recentlyish, it came out in paperback and I bought it and put it into my carry-on! I don't know about you, but I read books like this as a sort of booster shot, a quick medicinal jolt that reactivates my feminist—um—consciousness. So when they're not actually painful to wade through I find myself recommending them overenthusiastically, the way you would a good doctor with a short waiting-room line. Read it, it's good for you!