Oh wow. yeah those Baby-Sitters Club ones. I used to read them a lot as…er brain candy. That phrase just conjures up images of cannibals eating saccharine gray matter. Yum. Chocolate brain stem, raspberry flavored medulla!
Okay. That was really it…pointless post I know.
I’m kind of curious, however, as to what is considered non-fluffy reading. Some of the stuff can’t be considered hugely mindbreaking/contraversial but is good nonetheless, but is hardly fluffy either…
My own particular “chewing gum for the mind” would have to be the occasional romance. Gotta admit it, but like tisiphone, I prefer authors that are at least literate, including the ones on her list, plus [sub]cringe[/sub] LaVyrle Spencer. I also like humorous stuff like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, et al.
Most of my reading is fiction and a lot of it is pretty deep. Sheri Tepper is my current deep-thought author–just re-read The Gate to Women’s Country. After reading something as heavy as that, I want “candy”. I just dived into my Dilbert collection last night as an antidote to the Tepper.
I agree with several other posters…I think “stupid” is a harsh term. I love writers like Anne Rule, Dean Koontz, Crichton, King , et al. I try to alternate “good” books (Lawrence, Graeme Greene, Proulx, O’Brien) with the mind candy books though.
I would only feel embarassed if I actually read & enjoyed tripe like Danielle Steele, or bodice rippers. Yes; I’ve tried reading that s**t, and it’s just too sophomoric for me.
I don’t have a TV (not for any crunchy~granola elitist reasons), and regard forays into the internet, and my mind candy reading, as “Brain TV.” 
I did say competent writers, didn’t I? 
She is featured rather largely here as an example of what not to do.
tisiphone that is too funny!
Last year I actually composed several horrible pieces of writing for Bulwer-Lytton, but doubted they were hideous enough, so I never submitted them.
BTW, I don’t mean to knock bodice~rippers, or people who read them, in general! Like science fiction, it’s just not a genre I can get into.
Robert Jordan.
<sigh>
I just had to rearrange a bookshelf to accomodate the growing numbers of Star Wars books that are finding their way into my house. I think if you leave two of them together overnight, there’s six by morning.
I’m also a big fan of Parker’s Spenser books, although the character Spenser drives me up a wall. Sometimes I wonder if I read them just to get myself worked up. Oh, and Lawrence Block’s Burglar series.
Anyone ever read Brian Daley’s three Han Solo books? They were good, in a Hostess Twinkie sort of way…
I still read Archie comics. I have a huge collection in my basement after buying them for years and years growing up. I don’t buy anymore, just read the old ones over and over when I need to kill some time.
Xanth was what got me into reading (I can’t for the life of me remember the first one I read…), because after years of being forced to read crappy “classic” books in school, I found out that, shockingly, reading could actually be fun.
No book will ever top my love for Terry Goodkind’s “Wizard’s First Rule”…900+ pages of greatness. Some people consider it to be a “stupid” book, but I love it…The whole Sword of Truth series is great.
I don’t tend to enjoy “fluff” books because I demand that any book I read, be it a light sci fi novel or a real head-scratcher, should be well-written. Clumsy prose irritates the hell out of me, and reading it is not a pleasurable experience. I particularly hate when the writing is “accessible”–no big words, no complex sentence structure–I find it stultifying. (Heh, there’s a good vocabulary word for ya!) Some of my friends like cheesy romance novels and mysteries, but I find that reading them a greater labor than slogging through a more “worthy” tome. Then again, I have an unfortunate tendency to read “deep” books and just be swept along by the prose, and not stop and think too hard about what I’m reading. Also, I’m sure that what I consider “worthy” some other people might label “junk,” too.
Hey, Tsugumo–Four legs good, two legs baaaaaadd! (I love imagining the sheep bleating that out.)
Gore Vidal? On a list of “fluff”? WTF?
Except for those “Edgar Box” mysteries, the man has never produced anything that I would call “fluff”.