Gimme Things to Read

So I've been reading a bunch of chick lit lately and I enjoy it quite a bit. Except that I've discovered that a bunch of these chick lit books have a theme that I don't particularly enjoy. It's the one where the vapid woman is only concerned with designer clothes and finding the right man. They don't care about anything else. And by the end of the book, you don't think they deserved the billionaire prince, much less a happy ending.

Now the novels I do enjoy have other things going on. Two authors that come to mind are Jennifer Crusie's novels and Meg Cabot's Heather Wells series. Though they're all somewhat romancy, they have other things going on. And they have, like real jobs! Like in the Heather Wells series, she's solving murders, but she's also working in a dorm, I mean, residence hall, and she's also trying to relaunch her singing career. All of which is complicated by the fact that she's living with a man she's majorly crushing on, but is the brother of the guy she used to date and the guy doesn't even see her with girlfriend possibility eyes.

An example of a novel that I don't like is one in which the woman works for a small financial magazine and would truly prefer to work for Vogue or Cosmo, but she doesn't do anything about getting a job there, nor does she try to even understand anything that she's writing in the financial magazine. She spends more money than she earns and basically falls into a line of work that she enjoys and begins paying off her bills. What I'd prefer is if she actively went out and tried to do a good job.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I like more realistic situations where the people in it try and struggle and then succeed. They deserve their success because they worked hard for it.

So help me out here. Recommend some novels that have strong heroines!