Thoughts for Thursday - from Pepys

Work has been an utter hell of pointless yet time-consuming drivel. So for this Thursday, we'll let Samuel Pepys have his say. It is good to check his diary out from time to time and read about people mounting horses and drinking at taverns and suchlike.

Name that guilty pleasure

I’m due for a long Proust blog, but as I’m only 16 pages into the second volume, “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (the cumbersome title makes me grumpy), I will cheat with a Monday poll: Dear reader, do you have the literary equivalent to a Big Mac? What is the junky book you’ve perused more than once, the one you revisit when you’re simultaneously dipping into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey and checking out MTV’s Real World?

I’d have to admit to more than one, but as for lowbrow lit, my secret indulgence would have to be “Gone With the Wind.” While not total trash, it isn’t exactly great literature, and I’ve read it so many times, I can recite whole passages by heart. For utter, total, unequivocal trash: “Lucifer’s Hammer,” Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Brimming with misogyny, rife with stereotypes, and dangerously dated, this end-of-the-world novel has reeled me in on more than one occasion (nope, I won’t say how many times I’ve actually read it).

Anyone else out there ready to ‘fess up? Which guilty pleasure do you indulge in that you’d be embarrassed to be caught reading by anyone with a legitimate library card?