As the votes rolled in, Pride and Prejudice headed the list of the 50 best books in the history of women's literature, and the Babu heaved a tired sigh. His personal picks--Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Sense and Sensibility, if one must have Austen--came in way down the list. Of course he knew there wasn't a chance in hell anyone would nominate the brilliant, unsettling Ursula K Le Guin. Odd how these things work, though. The Babu can name three books off the top of his head that should fit into the category of "women's literature" as opposed to "literature written by women"--Lolita, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. But of course they don't qualify. Blame it on the chromosome factor. (And for the painfully patriotic--yeah, yeah, Arundhati Roy made it, at number 20. She's stirring up things again, incidentally, and this time her guns are trained square on the US.)