Short is the joy that guilty pleasure brings.
– Euripides
Books: Guilty Pleasures
You probably won’t find these books very easily on my shelves — they’re stuffed in corners, hidden behind other books, slipped discreetly beneath the couch. Some of them are guilty pleasures because they don’t fit my taste at all; others are guilty pleasures because they’re too much to my taste (and not to anyone else’s).
Eyewitness to Disaster by Dan Perkes
I found this book — a heavy, oversized, battered copy — in my local library when I was about nine years old. It quickly became one of my regular checkout items; I was glad when the library installed a self-checkout machine, because I was sick of the weird looks the librarians gave me when they checked it out to me. See, the content is just what the title implies: photographs of famous (and infamous) disasters. A woman jumping to her death from several stories high to escape a hotel fire, a victim’s sodden body being lifted from the wreck of the Eastland, a pile of charred corpses from a circus-tent blaze... it’s a morbidian’s dream.
The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey
This is like the children’s book from Hell — a little alphabet rhyme about various children and their horrible fates, accompanied by Edward Gorey’s elegant and wickedly morbid illustrations. If you read it enough, it sticks in your head to the point where you can’t hear the names without thinking of the corresponding deaths — A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil, devoured by bears... If I ever have a baby shower, I’m certain my family knows my tastes well enough to get me this book.
A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett
As a rough-and-tumble tomboy kid, I tended to shy away from anything that could be even remotely construed as a romance novel. How and why I latched onto this book so firmly is a mystery, even to me. The beautiful Lady Clorinda’s adventures are definitely of the romantic variety, and of the archaically romantic variety, at that; this is a sweeping tale of beauty, passion, and intrigue, with a willful and irresistable heroine at the heart of it all. Even now, when I need a break from my usual intelligent fare, I like to return to this relatively light, don’t-think-just-feel storyline. Perhaps, in some childhood fantasy, I imagined myself as Clorinda herself — gorgeous, powerful, manipulative, and able to wield a horsewhip like nobody’s business. As far as romantic heroines go, I could probably have chosen worse...
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
The only reason I keep this book in my personal library is that every time I read it, I come up with a different opinion of it. On the one hand, it’s sexist crap, the manifesto of a chauvinistic pig who treated his own poor wife like shit... but on the other hand, it makes some pretty interesting points about marriage and morality, both then and now. I go from nodding emphatically one minute to shaking my head furiously the next — no wonder my neck hurts so much after reading this...
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Many’s the hour I spent as a girl poring over my tattered copy of this book, a relic of my mother’s own childhood. (Years later, I found out the damn thing was abridged — thanks, Mom.) Despite being older and wiser and even more annoyed with the not-so-subtle moralizing and the inexplicable changes in Jo’s character, I still creep back every now and then for a re-read. Some of the classic scenes will forever be imprinted on my imagination: Meg at “Vanity Fair,” Jo’s shearing, Beth slipping next door to play Mr. Laurence’s piano, Amy and her limes. And every now and then, when I’ve just done something particularly clumsy, I can’t stop myself from exclaiming, “Christopher Columbus!”
Looking Forward to Being Attacked by Lt. Jim Bullard
Got an obscene caller? Yay! A peeping Tom? Woohoo! A lecherous professor, or a friendly local mugger? Hot diggity! With this book in your personal library, you’ll be waiting impatiently for some creep to mess with you. Then you can show him all your cool new moves — the pen-in-the-eye trick, the crushing-the-trachea-with-your-bare-fingers sally, the breaking-the-stranglehold-and-the-strangler’s-wrist move. With plenty of move-by-move descriptions and amusing illustrations to help you along, this book teaches you all the self-defense moves you could ask for, and how to have fun while performing them. Just the title headings alone are worth the purchase price (see my Favorite Quotes page). I’ve tested these moves with my (former) friends and karate teachers, so I’m here to say that they work as advertised. And I have to say that I appreciate a self-defense manual that doesn’t reinforce the victim mentality — instead, it encourages the victim to look at self-defense as not just a right, but a delight. So the next time you feel a hand on your knee, grab that cretin’s little finger and twist it ’til it snaps! How much more fun can you have?
