Your literary "guilty pleasures"

Black Library stuff. Some of their books (DAN ABNETT) are genuinely good, but I like their two universes enough to happily romp about in these stories even if I don't find them the best of literature. I'm usually fairly snobby about the quality of the prose, but I don't care so much if it's about Ultramarines blowing up Orks.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. And I'm supposed to be an adult. Great.

Larry Correia and John Ringo, especially when the right wing politics gets especially explicit.

The Mortal Instruments series

Anonymous Rex and the series that followed it. Good characters, interesting world, incredibly silly.

Going to second Inheritance. Stupid books in a lot of ways, but they're still fun to read. Never got around to reading the fourth one, though.

I'd say The Selection, but my enjoyment of that series is something that kind of fluctuates, especially when you realize that the author set up a sort of straw man political system for her Canon Sue to knock down. What I do enjoy, genuinely, is Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I always buy the next book under pretense of it being for my younger brother, but I think it's about time I dropped that charade. Finally, I noticed on the front page, there were some people talking about actually enjoying the things we have to read in school. 2 years ago, we read this one story, I can't remember the name, but there was like this old lady and this murderer in disguise and you had no idea who was really who till the end. Most people in my class thought it was too confusing (and it was a bit hard to follow at times), but I understood it perfectly and loved it. One thing my whole class did enjoy was The Odyssey. But I'm going off on a tangent now.

• Warhammer 40K and Warhammer novels

• Zombie Novels (Time of Death, Zombies Attack!, Tankbread)

• Dresden Files knock offs

• Indie Cthulhu novels (Redneck Eldritch, The Statement of Andrew Doran, Cthulhu Attacks!)

Basically, heavy genre fiction not published by the Big Five.

Am reading one right now, Inferno by Dan Brown

As you can probably tell by my avatar, Film Noir stories, especially those featuring a Hardboiled Detective.

I never shut up about them, and I think my friends are starting to hate me. :/

Bump

Uuuhh, I used to read a lot of Dan Brown even after knowing how much bullshittery his books contained. I still digged his writing style, though that may have been more due to the translator. I don't think I would actually spend money on him nowadays, though.

Catherine Fisher's YA novels. Relic Master, Incarceron, the Oracle Trilogy. I know I'm way too old for it, but it's so much just comfort reading - I know the worlds and can just snuggle in and absorb the delicious turns of phrase.

Jack Reacher

Enough said

Unofficial Minecraft or Pokemon Go novels tend to be So Bad, It's Good.

The Sheik is quite a guilty pleasure of mine. Quite a horrifying book even by today's standards.

edited 7th Jan '18 11:16:23 AM by Albino_Axolotl

I like The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Claire a ridiculous amount.

Same, actually! The Infernal Devices series is so great

The science-fiction novel The Imprudent Traveler (not sure about the English title, the original being Le Voyageur Imprudent), by René Barjavel.
It’s about this guy from “present time” (that meaning early-to-mid-40s France, and you know how that was going) using a time-traveling pill (time pill for short), then committing heists in the Gay Paree of the Gay Nineties, and other fun activities involving the time pill. All in all a very pleasant novel.

Why guilty? That story was published as a serial in Je Suis Partout (I’m everywhere), the most famous of all newspapers fancied by Les Collaborateurs, that’s why.

Other than that, in that same space-time, I prefer the works of Joseph Kessel to his contemporary Barjavel’s, literary-wise and otherwise.

Warrior Cats. I dislike cats and pity feral cats, but it's the most popular xenofiction series out there, and I like the fandom, so I read it despite preferring the other Erin Hunter series by far.

My guilty pleasures are erotica and romance novels in general, partly because the girly side of me loves a good romance and partly because the writing can sometimes be very funny or downright hilarious, especially when writers try and get creative with euphemisms.

One novel I read (Beauty Tamed the Beast by Eloise James) ended up being the (published and very well known) author's excuse to write a House MD AU fanfic. And had 2 doctors named Kibble and Bitts in it.

Novels by David Eddings. It's formulaic fantasy, but I love the characters and their snarky dialogue.

Wings of Fire. The series is for 12-year-olds and the excessively snarky dialogue does get a bit old, but the setting and plot just remind me of a fantasy-action cartoon, I grew up with Warrior Cats and Guardians of Ga'Hoole so they're a big nostalgia trip, and I love the dragon designs.

Wings of Fire is so good. It's so graphic too. I swear it puts Warriors to shame sometimes.

Dan Brown, and "Penny Dreadful" kind of stories