why i read trash …. sometimes
OK. So I’m a professor of reading. I not only have read but love the classics — Anna Karenina, all of Jane Austen’s work, Dickens, Eliot, the Brontes, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather — the list goes on and on. Our apartment is filled with books, many of them the kind of thing you’d probably expect to find in a professor’s apartment (and too many of them, I know, I know).
But right now, when I am busier than a three-headed politician, I don’t have the mental capacity to dive into the kind of reading I usually choose. I have Ahab’s Wife on my nightstand, along with the Age of American Unreason and Hard Times (Dickens), but in the last two weeks I have read not one but two craptastic mysteries. In fact the second one was labeled “romantic suspense” and I thought if Lisa Jackson, the author, wrote the phrase “her long, witchy wavy raven hair” one more time I would actually burn it in the kitchen sink. But, and this is a BIG BUT, I absolutely had to know how she got together with the man she thought was her half brother and all the simmering sexual tension…. you get the gist. It is spring, after all.
This is just to say that if I make fun of a book (and I’m pretty sure I’ve gone off on Mitch Albom at least once), I have no leg to stand on. There’s another one of these books at home waiting for me and as my to do list grows, I keep thinking about just reading ….
April 15th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
My guilty pleasure is reading those “craptastic” books as well! Jennifer Cruise makes me laugh out loud. However, I feel that I have redeemed myself through my recent video rentals; About Jane and The Jane Austen Book Club.
It’s a good balance.
April 17th, 2008 at 2:38 am
I know what you mean about easy reading… With my current state of busy-ness, I don’t feel like thinking too much about a book…hence the next book on my to-read list: Losin’ It, the “tell all” autobio by …Valerie Bertinelli…