Guilty Pleasures, pt. 1

(Don't worry; this will only be a one-and-a-half part series, not five like The Art of Translation. 😏)

It had to come up sometime.

What’s up with so-called “guilty pleasures”? Is that even a real thing? Is it okay to read them? Is it okay to admit that you read them?

You may have noticed from this blog that I’m rather into literature of a “higher quality,” so to speak: classics, award-winners, literary fiction (instead of genre fiction*), foreign literature, etc. This is what I spend most of my time reading. I’m careful to analyze a book’s form (more than its content), will praise all sorts of aspects of writing (not just “Yeah, the book was fun/cool/clever, I guess.”), often sprinkle my thoughts with references to other books and writers, etc.

Despite this, though, the answer to all of the above is: yes, they exist; yes, it’s okay to read them; and yes, it’s okay to admit that you read them. Of course it is! Gotta do what you love, right?

As I’ve stated once or twice before, if I’m not reading to learn, I’m reading to be entertained or inspired. And dang it if “guilty pleasures” aren’t entertaining. Sometimes all I’m in the mood for is a fun book that’ll make me smile or laugh without requiring any sort of depth as I approach it. In fact, odd though it may sound, sometimes it's great to read for fun as a break from reading for analysis. 

Crazy, I know.

So what qualifies as a “guilty pleasure,” anyway?

I suppose the easy answer to this is: a book (or movie, video game, song, etc. though I’m not really thinking about those right now) which isn’t really “high-quality,” so to speak, but is highly enjoyable anyway. Or we could say it's a book that we like more than it, per se, deserves to be liked.

Of course there can be exceptions to that description (and some people might take offense to it, though I promise none is intended), but it’s close enough for us to work with for now.

For sure guilty pleasures can go too far sometimes. Fifty Shades of Grey should never be read by anyone ever, even if you're only approaching it as a "guilty pleasure." No no no. Please read anything else in the history of ever. Ever. I mean: ever. Like, EVER. No really.

But on the whole, taking a break from the depth and the analysis and the captivatingly intellectual can be refreshing, right?

I'll give you an overarching example (then a couple specific examples).

Though I haven't yet discussed it in this realm, I love horror. (I'll be sure to share LOTS of thoughts on the matter in the future. Hehe...) That said, there are very very precious few horror books that I (or most people, I would argue) would actually consider to be "high quality." The overwhelmingly vast majority of horror novels are really nothing more than...well, guilty pleasures. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, especially amongst the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. But these days, most horror is more enjoyable than it is intellectually gratifying.

(By the way, I could actually say the same thing about Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Mystery; I merely decided to focus on Horror for a moment there.)

And that's okay.

I'm also a sucker for novelizations of video-games - or, at least, books that are based on/take place in video game universes. A couple favorites are Bioshock by John Shirley and Darksiders: The Abomination Vault by Ari Marmell. Are they going to win awards? Were they written exceptionally well? Absolutely not. But they sure as heck were fun. And even though I know a lot of these aren't going to be good, I still can't help but pick them up when I go to Barnes & Noble.


What about you, friends? What are some guilty pleasures that you read/enjoy? (But please don't tell me if it's Fifty Shades of Grey.)

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* This may surprise you, my claim that I read more general literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction (mystery, sci-fi, etc.). If you look at the number of my reviews for genre fiction, they add up to more than the general fiction, at least as of the time I'm writing this. That said, though, I'll ask you to keep a couple things in mind:

1. I'm trying to give you a good variety of reviews. I'd hate to only give you one type of review, or reviews for only one type of book.
2. I'm not posting the reviews for every single book I read, nor even in the order I read them. In fact, I've only reviewed for you a little over half of the books I've actually read since I first began this blog several weeks ago. (I'm sort of working on some of the others, but these things take time, you know.)