Confession: My Guiltiest Literary Pleasures

I recently read an article on Slate where contemporary authors were asked to list the literary greats they’ve never read, or, as an alternate question, to name their guiltiest literary pleasures. It was an interesting read that caused me to reflect on those questions myself.

Well, there are too many greats I haven’t read. I’m too embarrassed to even begin to list what I haven’t gotten around to yet. I think I’m still recovering from the time I told someone I hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye, let alone Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. (I suppose I’ve just let some of my omissions slip.) Nevertheless, I will dish about the guilty pleasures. Although also potentially embarrassing to reveal, they’re just more fun to reveal. When it comes to whether I’ve read certain books, eliciting chuckles is more fun than eliciting slack-jawed looks of incredulity. Here are just a few from various stages of life:

Judy Blume: My adolescent guilty pleasure
I can’t be alone. I can’t be the only preteen girl who devoured book after book of Judy Blume’s novels, all dripping with girly, pubescent tales of crushes and friend fights and desperately hoping for whomever to notice you and first kisses and rebellious peers and whirling, rollercoaster adolescent angst. I think the only part of Judy Blume-dom I didn’t really get into was the Superfudge series. I wanted (what I thought was) the real deal. I think I must’ve read Tiger Eyes about five times.

Frank Peretti: The height of my Christian fiction high
He catapulted into mainstream fame with his novel This Present Darkness. I knew I would be tumbling into a downward spiral of Peretti addiction after reading a goose bump-raising description of two average Joe-type guys metamorphosing into resplendent angels in the opening scene of the aforementioned novel. After that, Peretti pretty much did me in for a while. I do think Peretti is a good writer, but I know he’s not looked at in a serious light by those outside the Christian fiction circle. The best Peretti book ever? The Visitation.

Mary Higgins Clark: My occasional dalliance in the murder mystery world
I fear that this one may be the one to elicit the most chuckles. Her stories are formulaic: An extremely beautiful, young, female, professional New Yorker is almost always the protagonist who is almost always personally affected by a murder. Whodunit ensues. The killer is almost always a deceptively charming man—but the one you never would have suspected! As soon as I finished Loves Music, Loves to Dance I was hooked because when the identity of the killer was finally revealed, I was floored. Ooh, I love surprises.

I know you’ve got some of your own guilty literary pleasures you’ve been keeping under wraps. Come on, ‘fess up.

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