"Mr. Peabody's Apples," Madonna's second effort, descends on the planet this week. It is neither bouncy nor flirty. Set in an idyllic 1940s small-town America where boys play baseball every weekend, it's the story of a benevolent (or malevolent?) teacher who helps an earnest young boy learn a lesson that will last a lifetime. While "The English Roses" is both shockingly bad and deeply appealing -- much like Madonna used to be, jiggling her boobs around and singing "Oooh, I'm gonna keep my baby!" -- "Mr. Peabody's Apples" is dour and joyless, despite the pretty masculinity of Loren Long's Norman Rockwell-style illustrations.

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This May, the girl detective's literary mother died, as well; Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote 23 of the original Nancy Drew mystery stories, was 96.

Back when I was 9 and my Nancy Drew mania was at its peak, my friends and I had already heard that there was no "Carolyn Keene," ostensible author of what are now well over 150 adventures (not counting spinoff series). Telling a child there's no Carolyn Keene is "like saying there's no Santa Claus," as Benson herself said to Salon in 1999, but some unkind grown-up did tell my friend Sunshine, and she told me. Together, we looked at the row of 50-some novels on the library's Nancy Drew shelf and reasoned that, come to think of it, no one person could write so many, even if she wrote for her whole entire life! (Publishing history is sketchy, as it is with most series fiction, but it looks like there were 56 titles available in different variations until 1979, when Simon & Schuster started publishing new Nancy Drews in paperback, one every other month.)

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For Maggie's 18th, then, we needed something even more adventurous than Playgirl. It was January 1985: a time for firsts. I would lose my virginity two nights later (if memory serves) and Lizzie had lost hers two days earlier. We were hot to trot, and there was safety in numbers. We decided to watch some porn.

In Maggie's parents' house, the basement rec room was totally separate from the rest of the building. Private. By the time high school was over, we had all puked, smooched boys and smoked pot down there at one point or another. On the night of her birthday, we convened in that basement -- snickering and whispering -- to hear the advice of our most experienced member, Renee.

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"The Fourth Hand," Irving's first novel since winning the Academy Award for the screenplay of "The Cider House Rules," is comparatively small. It is shorter than the others, certainly, but it also matters less. The instigating tragedy is comparatively minor: Beefcake newscaster Patrick Wallingford's left hand is eaten by an Indian circus lion. Patrick wants a new hand very badly, but his life goes on as before, anyhow: reporting on disasters for a third-rate news channel, sleeping with countless women thanks to his movie-star looks -- and never quite landing in the world. He is not a person of depth, and losing his hand does not make him one: "It had previously been Patrick's experience that women were easily smitten with him, at least initially; it had also been his experience that women got over him easily, too."

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I took it home, read it in a weekend. Centaurs! Dragons! Titillating sexual references, action, jokes and people being transformed into basilisks and sphinxes. I was hooked.

I then consumed "The Source of Magic" (Xanth 2), "Castle Roogna" (X3), "Centaur Aisle" (X4), "Ogre, Ogre" (X5), "Night Mare" (X6), "Golem in the Gears" (X7) and "Crewel Lye" (X8) in swift succession, only stopping when I got a boyfriend who read philosophy and made me feel embarrassed about my reading habits. Now Anthony's latest, "The Dastard" (X24), is out in hardcover, and it's been years since I immersed myself in the pleasure of reading series fantasy. (Well, that's not exactly accurate. Like everyone else, I read the Harry Potter books, and their popularity has led me both to return to Xanth and to contemplate just what makes this genre so satisfying. Also, Anthony is devilish fun, and nobody is paying him any critical attention, even though a large number of Xanth books have hit the New York Times bestseller list.)

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I first encountered these magazines 10 years ago at my friend Rachel's house. She got engaged right after college, and I remember feeling shocked and a little embarrassed to see that she subscribed to Modern Bride. She had even earmarked certain pages that featured puffy white gowns and romantic floral arrangements. It was like seeing a Penthouse subscription on the coffee table with the owner's favorite spreads dog-eared: an open revelation of intense fantasizing.

When I got engaged at 31, I realized that I had spent my entire adult life repressing similar reveries. Somehow, despite a hippie childhood, divorced parents, feminist politics and a preference for black above all other colors, I had developed a wealth of bridal dreams. I had just never acknowledged them before, denying my arousal at the sight of a glittering diamond ring or a bouquet of tightly bound miniature roses.

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I don't think of sex when commercials come on TV. I don't get hot when I see Robert Downey Jr. with his shirt off on the cover of Details. And I don't sweat when the "Thong Song" comes on the radio, although I read somewhere that the average person thinks about sex several times an hour.

When I have it, I like sex probably an average amount -- which is to say, I enjoy it very much, but it's not a preoccupation or anything. I do an average range of sex stuff. I'm not a prude, but I have certain things I'd rather not do (like have sex with other people watching) and certain things I enjoy on a regular basis that are so mainstream as to be pedestrian (like the missionary position).

Sometimes I'm in the mood for sex to be an epic and systematic debauchery, but other times I just enjoy it in a moderate sort of way and am ready for it to be over in about 15 or 20 minutes.

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So writes Colette Dowling, author of "The Cinderella Complex," in her entertaining feminist argument about women's strength: "The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality." "By making themselves physically equal [through exercise and self-defense training]," Dowling writes, "women can at last make themselves free."

I loved this book. Dowling describes the achievements of the first woman to play men's pro baseball, the girls' soccer team that beat all the boys' teams in the 1993 Ohio games, a 10th-grader who made the all-state Georgia football team. Katherine Switzer dodged irate officials to compete in the all-male Boston Marathon. Bev Francis changed the face of women's bodybuilding by refusing to limit the size of her muscles to appropriately feminine proportions. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. These stories are so inspirational that I would like to believe every word Dowling says -- but some of her argument is just wishful thinking.

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The premise of the book is rather clever: to pursue the Austen-obsessed heroine beyond the marriage that so conveniently closes the classic novelist's six completed works. "Austen never looked at life after her heroine's marriage," Bokat writes, "the swelling of Elizabeth Bennet's belly, the agony of childbirth, the potential that Mr. Darcy could lose his fortune."

Eve, Bokat's heroine, is a New York grad student writing a dissertation titled "Emma's Entitlement: Jane Austen's Feminist Models." The finished project is rejected by her advisor, which prompts a major crisis of identity. Eve then leaves her mild-mannered husband, infant daughter and overbearing Jewish mother for an indefinite sojourn in England. By the end, her husband forgives her and her dissertation is awarded a book contract.

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I hate them, too.

Sure, they are small and moderately cute. They sit or come on command and bark winsome renditions of songs like "When the Saints Come Marching In" and "B-I-N-G-O." One of them even farts. But they lack something fundamental -- they don't engender the rush of sentiment I feel whenever a flesh-and-blood dog passes my way. Big or small, cute or ugly, mutt or purebred, I'm completely indiscriminate toward real dogs. "Hello, you lovely handsome thing, you!" I coo to the fat chocolate lab that lives in my building. I stroke the warm, wriggling body of the local Rottweiler and anxiously watch the growth of a bichon frisi puppy that has moved in up the block. (I have not had a dog since my mother gave a husky mutt named Trouble away to some close friends in 1972. Clearly, it is high time.)

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I, too, had a childhood. There was lemonade and hot powder sand and all the usual stuff. But it ended in 1979 -- the same year I discovered 007 and his license to kill. I was 12, desperate for pantyhose and fuzzy velour shirts, enamored of white roller skates with shiny blue wheels. After school, I used to throw myself down in the small space between the back of the couch and the stereo, turn the Kinks up loud and read about James Bond. I started with 1953's "Casino Royale," Fleming's first novel, and barreled my way through "Doctor No," "You Only Live Twice," "The Spy Who Loved Me" and all the rest.

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Here are five of my favorite Fleming Bondian moments that don't involve anyone's degradation -- unless you care about the giant squid.

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"Our customers love learning -- and the written word," say founders Steve and Lori Leveen in their introduction to the holiday catalog. That congratulatory message (on the order of "you are a reader, you special smart person, you") explains a kind of tchotchke that has existed for years and currently makes its home in the Levenger catalog and in bookstore gift departments. In an age when our media is constantly saturated with dire reports on how the average American watches four hours of television daily or on how pornographers might show your children dirty pictures on the Internet, the market for paraphernalia that identify their owner as literate and interested in books appears to be slowly and steadily expanding.

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Pronounce him "Woodhouse," thank you kindly. He is a humorist without peer. In 92 books (including 11 novels and countless short stories about the inimitable valet Jeeves), not to mention musical comedies galore, his verbal pyrotechnics made me appreciate the possibilities of language long before I ever considered going to graduate school for English literature. At the core of his appeal is the Wodehousean prose style: a mixture of mangled literary references, Edwardian slang, invented slang, ludicrous formality and remarkable joie de vivre.

Here is Bertie on the subject of his friend Boko's troubled love affair:

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But where was Eloise?

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