Even though I have two unread Thomas Hardy novels, and one by Virginia Woolf, that are sitting by my nightstand, I recently raided a used internet booksite and am now reading all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels in chronological order.
My next “guilty” purchase will be the complete collection of Enid Blyton’s “Famous Five” stories, that I read with great pleasure as a child, and still pick up on the visit to the family home. I am happy to say that my nephew is currently reading and re-reading them.
I’m not sure you should be embarrassed about that. I don’t like everything she wrote (like Scruples), but I liked Till We Meet Again, and I really liked Mistral’s Daughter. Basically, I think her novels are best when they’re at least partly set in the past. A highly romantic and hyperbolic tone works better when it’s nostalgic. If that makes any sense. At any rate, Mistral’s Daughter was a great help to me when I was a teenager in the horrible '80s, when a girl wasn’t considered date-worthy unless she had a bubble perm and fruit-scented lip gloss. The novel, which centers around artists, their models, the fashion industry and fashion models, makes the point that true beauty comes from spirit, not conformity.
Crappy novels are, so an English teacher once told me, “chewing gum for the brain”. 'Course, in those days, (1970s), chewing gum was, well, yuck. These days, it saves teeth by the truckload, so they say. But I digress.
I read romance novels, SF novels, and try to find the really interesting amongst the crappy. I do get good names for characters from them sometimes. I don’t read them all the time, because to do so would curdle what is left of my cobwebbed little brain cells. (Why the heck am I sounding that that stuffed-arsed English teacher of mine? Heck knows.)
Anyway, he didn’t like romance novels, but I proved him wrong over the lineage of the king in “The Scottish Play” by Shakespeare. Just happily chewin’ away …
Melanie Rawn’s Exiles series. I read them every year around exams and have already pre-ordered a copy of the third one (due out, oh, October 2002)
Also, Clive Barker, Stephen King, and Terry Brooks, all of which a co-worker of mine turned me on to. He would give me all of his books after he read them. Great guy.
Oh, right. and my trashy novels. But I have to get other people to buy them for me because I will not go up to the cashier with one of them…
I’ve got a soft spot for military sf. Steve White, David Weber, Lois Bujold, its all good. Something about giant hulks of metal exploding in space. It gets me right here. <choke>
Well, kind of. He’s a comedian, a writer (he wrote for Blackadder and The Yound Ones), an occasional actor (yes, that was him in Much Ado), and his current project is a musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber… about football. It’s not that embarressing but it’s not exactly Shakespeare. It’s now made slightly more embarressing by the fact that this hugely left-wing comedian (as he was in the eighties) is now working with Andrew Lloyd Webber of all people. Nyeh.
Anyway, apologies for the minor hijack. Please continue.
Um, now accepting suggestions from jarbaby and Creaky about what I should read over my four-day weekend?
Previous guilty pleasures include a Nora Roberts trilogy set in Ireland (Jewels of the Sun/Tears of the Moon/Heart of the Sea–just realized book #3 is out!), Ed McBain’s Matthew Hope series (I devour these whenever I’m at the inlaws) and trashy horror novels, particularly those with a li’l [sub]OK…a lot…[/sub]sex thrown in.
