Your literary "guilty pleasures"

What are the books that you know arent "great" literature, but you still enjoy them? For me its action-adventure stuff like The Executioner, Stony Man (and all the other offshoot titles), all that "men's adventure" stuff. Ridiculously over the top but they're still fun (and short) reads for me (I'm thinking of getting some of the Destroyer novels as i've heard they satirize the tropes present in these books, but i still havent found any of them yet).

If I may be perfectly honest, I always did enjoy the Inheritance books when I was a kid, even the fourth book, which I read after I knew about their reputation.

I probably wouldn't read them again, though.

For me, certain types of children's books. I found one called Keep Your Eye on Amanda that was actually a newspaper serial in book form. 80 pages tops, nothing mind blowing, but pretty cute because I like animals.

Of course, there are some slightly longer children's books that still hold up pretty darn well if you read them as an adult.

Depending on the book the Anita Blake series. Some are worth reading period, some are guilty pleasures and some aren't even worth reading as guilty pleasures.

I don't enjoy literature I find to be bad.

Less of a guilty pleasure but more of a thing I don't admit because I know it's not a good idea in front of my classmates, but I found myself enjoying some of the stuff we read in school. I'm actually sort of tired of hearing "Eh, it's soooo boring" from all sides every time we read something.

That always pissed me off.

I mean, okay, you don't like it. Why not?

From memory, the books we had to read were "classics". Meaning that the writers of them died long before we were born and it showed. Hemingway is fine for adults, but fuck's sake, people, making thirteen year olds read "The Old Man and The Sea" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is just asking for trouble.

Anyway, on topic, my guilty pleasures now are the books by Richard Roberts that I started reading a while ago. Particularly "Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain" and "Quite Contrary". They may be Young Adults literature but they are addictive.

How about having an 11-year-old read The Grapes of Wrath AND Gone with the Wind over summer vacation?

We only started reading classics in upper grade school/high school, so...we were 14. But the first book we read then was actually pretty interesting (it was about a murder and you really couldn't guess who did it for a very long time) and the second was just a pretty badly written retelling of the Nibelungenlied...I mean, our german teacher's generous for not making us read only Goethe, Schiller and Co. And Dürrenmatt's books are actually pretty interesting. Seriously, the only thing that I can't stand is Brecht, those are predictable, boring and the aesop is nothing new or inspiring.

What was the first one?

Also, yeah, I guess it's a little too much to except 13-year olds to appreciate some of the classics. My tastes varied - I liked To Kill a Mockingbird, but wasn't impressed by Catcher in the Rye.

Nothing wrong with YA novels. Stuff like Harry Potter and Hunger Games is popular for a reason.

edited 13th Sep '14 10:38:34 PM by KarkatTheDalek

The Baby-Sitters Club and R.L. Stine's Fear Street series. I was heartbroken when I found out the local bookshop by my mum's - which carried ALL of the BSC books, most Goosebumps, and some Fear Series - filed for bankruptcy and closed.

I admit I read a lot of Baby-Sitter's Club books when I was a kid too.

It was called "Jugend Ohne Gott" which means youth without god (because it's about murder between students). The author's Ödön von Horváth and he's austrian-hungarian (thanks wikipedia). Not sure if there's an english edition but if there is then it's not very well-known because there's no english wikipedia. Edit: Nevermind, I just found out that the english version is called The Age of The Fish. Spoiler title much?

edited 15th Sep '14 11:03:05 AM by Jarina

The Artemis Fowle series was pretty subpar, from a writing standpoint, but I was too invested in the characters to stop reading.

Subpar? Really? Care to elaborate?

I mean, I always enjoyed them without reservations...

Oh, the short version is awkward insertion of badly handled exposition, show vs. tell issues, that kind of thing. The prose can get clunky in places, unimaginative in others, over reliant on Rule of Cool in still others. It's pretty consistent throughout the series and comes off as juvenile at times. I'm generalizing here, of course. More subjective are the plot-holes and preachiness, which I found cringe inducing at times.

Most things I read, my favorite books per se, are Transgressive Fiction, which is always something very hard to talk about without causing it to look like a literature that just shocks people for the sake of it, whithout any bigger meaning. My favorite novels are "American Psycho", "A Clockwork Orange" and so on, but there are some post-modernist and bizarro stuff I like.

I'd say, my favorite novel itself, "My Idea of Fun" by Will Self is a very violent scatological one. Also, Matthew Stokoe's "Cows", which might be the most disgusting book you'll ever read in this life.

I like a lot of Edward Lee's stuff. Although I do not feel guilty reading it.

Monster Hunter International: the only cure for zombies and vampires is guns... lots of guns with explosives on top.

The Lion of Farside books. John Dalmas got into writing because he read the old Conan the Barbarian novels and thought he could do better. He's a fun read, but it's definitely escapist fantasy, with characters who use a Buddhist-like religion to get over traumas that a normal therapist could spend years treating with spotty success.

I used to like the Draka series but I managed to outgrow that one, at least.

Captain Underpants, all the way. Sure, it's not high literature in the slightest, but it puts a smile on my face (the earlier books, anyway; the recent ones got way too complicated with their time travel bullshit to me).

-looks side to side- Sword of Truth. Part of it is wondering what sort of Randian mishap and myopia Richard and pals will introduce to us next, another part is immature giggling at Emperor Jagang. He's terrifying when he's using his powers and playing to paranoia, but make him do a political speech and all bets are definitely off.

The works of Ellen Hopkins.

I'm fully aware that they're probably meant for teenage girls and housewives, but goddamn, I can't get enough of them.

However, I must question her use of Rape as Drama in literally every single book by hers that I've read. I'll spare the Crank trilogy from that criticism, since those books are heavily based on true events, but it's still annoying.

(And I fucking hated the plot twist in Identical.)

The entire Dork Diaries series.