As of tonight, my book-reading is 667 days behind my book-buying, according to a database that seems, frankly, to take a little too much satisfaction from issuing glum statistical pronouncements of this kind. It is my general policy (and yes, I know what it says about me that I have a policy about this) to progress in the order of acquisition, preserving the illusions that, first, I do intend to read every book I've purchased, and second, catching up is possible. The rare exceptions are almost always cases where I feel compelled to read something I've just purchased, like the remotest chance of my running into the author on the street, and not having anything to say yet, isn't worth the risk. Books written by people I know, personally, don't always qualify for this exception (Christopher John Farley's My Favorite War and Victoria Wohl's Greek-Tragedy doctoral dissertation, books by two of my former Harvard Lampoon colleagues, will wait their turns), but recently I hit three of them essentially at once, just as my regular schedule hit the entire pre-Galatea 2.2 corpus of Richard Powers, whose books are so intoxicating, to me, that I'm loath to plow through them all in a row, so a digression seemed prudent, or even mandated.

We edge a little closer to male-defined female sexuality with violinist Lili Haydn's 1997 debut album, Lili. Her songs veer into Kate Bush's quirky demesne more than once, but after the bombastic, tech-headed production (her own) gets through with them, they often end up sounding more like Toyah Wilcox. The cover art emphasizes her passing facial resemblance to Liv Tyler, and the protruding lines "She strips for strangers" and "My tits are real", in the first few songs, suggest the kind of album a fashion model might commission to surround to herself with. This superficial impression disintegrates almost instantly, however, and the only thought with any relation to models that lingers behind is that although Lili and Milla Jovovich's The Divine Comedy are polar production opposites, it seems to me that they share a compositional eccentricity and an instinct for abstruse detail. The oblique "Stranger" oscillates from chirpy, falsetto verses to fiery, surging choruses, and the line about stripping turns out to be part of the story of a hitchhiker the narrator picks up (I think), whose plight leads her to the encouraging plea "Liberate me from inaction". "Someday", part "Army Dreamers" dance remix and part gothic death-metal grind, interrupts a hopeful list of things in the girl's future to say "Someday we'll have a new language, / Someday we'll say what we mean", as if a new language is necessary for sincerity, like the language we have has had its capacity for honesty chewed completely out of it. "Real" exaggerates "Someday"'s structure, the delicate parts assuming a lunatic exuberance and the metal passages sinking further into blistering noise. The instrumental "Salome" combines Celtic and Eastern violin urges with a Loreena McKennitt-esque equanimity. "Take Somebody Home", musically the closest thing to a standard pop song (until the end when it starts morphing into "Night on the Bald Mountain"), turns out to be a child's confused entreaty to her mother to let them adopt some homeless people, the stray-pet instinct swelled into genuine human compassion. The dark, pounding "Faithful One", perhaps following the girl's mother into a nightmare, wonders what life would be like without her child. "Baby", its helicopter noises and irregular structure reminiscent of parts of Kate's The Ninth Wave, to me, and its hushed vocals seemingly borrowed from fellow violinist Lisa Germano, follows the baby's part of the story; the wah-laden "Mama" turns back to the mother, but is actually told from the child's point of view, as she apologizes for whatever part her existence played in the mother staying in an abusive relationship, and hopes the mother's experience will show them both how to escape. The brittle "Daddy", punctuated by pummeling orchestral timpani and a blood-curdling half-yodel, half-shriek, has, unsurprisingly, little to say to the absent man other than, over and over, accusingly, "I feel you, Daddy". And after that Lili seems to run out of words for the family, and the finale, "Wants Deep", is another instrumental, slow, drifting piano forming a cold, gleaming frame for Lili's eerie, sighing violin. Her violin winds through all these songs, in fact, and unlike with Tracy Bonham, where to me the violin gets swallowed up in the rest of the noise, and Lisa Germano, where the songs are so frightening that it makes no difference what instruments are involved, Lili seems to me like a rock album built around the violin the way most rock albums are built around guitars. And though the violin isn't strictly a women's instrument, it somehow sounds, in Lili's hands, like the cornerstone of what could, if enough people wanted it to, be a feminine rock form the men would have to sneak into the same way women have had to surreptitiously learn to play power chords.

Another step towards pop convention gets us to the Tuesdays, who look like L7, and are from Norway, but who sound almost more like my sense memory of the Bangles, circa Different Light, than the Bangles themselves do when I actually get the album out. It must be intentional; the catches in Laila Samuels' voice, in particular, are too much like Susanna Hoffs' to have come about any other way than years singing along to "Manic Monday" in a full-length mirror. Perhaps the Tuesdays are more of a rock band than the Bangles actually were, on inspection, but it's easy to imagine that this is largely an adjustment for context, an updating in the same way that Roxette seems to me like what Abba would have sounded like if they'd been born later. Rehashes this unalloyed are a subjective hit-or-miss, but for me this is one of the marvelous ones. I have a place in my heart for these big, shiny ballads and snappy, adorable pop trifles, for lines like "Don't you make my brown eyes blue?", "You can hang your toothbrush next to mine", "When I made love to him / I was thinking of you", and "Free your mind / 'Cause life's too short / To waste your time". And it seems to me that it is this giddy, simplistic, romantic, mythical past, in fact, that lurks, whether they acknowledge it or not -- whether they feel it or not -- behind Katie Roiphe and Elizabeth Wurtzel's darker formulations of a woman's proper responsibilities to herself. Princess was so much easier a part to play. If only there ever really was a time when women, or men for that matter, were born so close to happiness that the only talent required to claim it was not changing shoe sizes overnight.

And out at the far end of the musico-sexual spectrum, finally, where the women have the rubbery complexion of blow-up dolls, and live lives, like Elizabeth paints Nicole Brown Simpson's, from which nothing good is bound to come, is Vixen. The very idea of an all-girl band playing utterly male heavy metal, frankly, is more than a little pornographic, and the band's first two records, 1988's Vixen and 1990's Rev It Up, pandered to the same stunted teenage male notion of sexuality as all those "fantasy" calendars featuring comically misproportioned women in brass bikinis. But embarrassingly, I enjoyed them. I liked Fiona and Lita Ford better, to be sure, but there weren't enough of their albums. These aren't my dream women, any of them, but there's something mesmerizing, to me, about their blissful unselfconsciousness. Compare the cover of Bitch to the cover of Fiona's Beyond the Pale. Both women look like they will drive you insane, but Elizabeth looks like she knows she's being difficult, so it's possible to imagine, if you got desperate, reasoning with her, and because reasoning is possible, it's also possible to resent her behavior. Fiona, on the other hand, looks like she'll probably make a stuffed Persian cat seem like a therapist, and it's as useless to blame her for the damage she causes as it is to pledge vengeance on a tornado. I wouldn't last ten minutes with her, but there's something reassuring about the idea that such women do exist, like it's encouraging to think about retired seamstresses winning the lottery, even if I disapprove of their participation.