Hanne Blank's excellent article in the Baltimore City Paper about just why 98 percent of most "chick lit" is so distressingly bad:

This is, I think, what genuinely should be criticized about these silly novels by lady novelists: not their humor, not their tone, not their tissue-paper plots or their tiresome fixation on looks, but their obliviousness to their own words and what their words indicate. They are, to put it bluntly, not self-aware enough to realize that the constant low-grade misery they depict has larger causes and both larger and smaller cures. Insofar as these novels and their anti-role-model protagonists are nonetheless role models for their readers to some degree, that's a crying shame.

As someone who's read a few of the novels that Blanke mentions (usually for work...but I'm not just saying that as an excuse as to why I read them), I'll say that most of the titles in question are usually disappointing not for what they include (hey, I love shoes, frou-frou drinks and thinking about boys too) but for what they don't include: true philosophical angst, domestic dilemmas, sexuality that reaches beyond the hetero boundaries, thoughts about 401Ks and struggles with self-identity, depression and self-worth. Every time one of these books picks up an interesting thread it quickly drops it again (for example: the incredible sadness that surrounds the abandonment issues concerning the young child in The Nanny Diaries) as if the author's ashamed that she touched upon a painful bruise and almost had us smarting.