Tuesday Top Five: Guilty Pleasure Books
May. 27th, 2025 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nevanna“Guilty pleasure” can be a loaded term, especially when it comes to media consumption. When compiling this list, I avoided titles that fell into the following categories.
A. The pleasure of the book is “guilty” because I am not its target audience (children or young adults).
B. The pleasure of the book is “guilty” because I am its target audience and we’re socially conditioned to think of fiction marketed toward women as frivolous.
C. The book was good but the author Did A Problematic Thing (or was Insufficiently Marginalized to tell the story they were telling). Those conversations aren’t without value, but I’m much more interested in discussing the actual text.
Instead, I decided to look at titles that I enjoy even though I disagree with something fundamental about the creative choices that went into them.
1. The Chronicles of the Deryni (1970-2014) by Katherine Kurtz
I’ve written a lot – mostly on Tumblr – about Kurtz’s long-running fantasy series, and it definitely falls into the category of “I love this thing, but I don’t think everyone, even fans of the genre, shouldwatch read this thing.” I read most of the series when I was twenty-one, and even then, I was bored by the recurring political and religious intrigue (although if you read fantasy for that type of plot, you might enjoy them more than I did), wasn’t particularly impressed by the portrayal of female characters, and was unnerved or downright repulsed by some of the ways that even sympathetic Deryni (psychic sorcerers) meddle in the lives and minds of ordinary humans. All of that said, the books contain significant amounts of psychic intimacy and hurt/comfort that more than satisfy my persistent thirst for those tropes, even when I disagree with the characters involved. I also sometimes joke that Alaric Morgan was written for me, personally, and I unironically love his relationship with his right-hand man, Derry, a whole lot.
2. False Memory (1999) by Dean Koontz
Author and book bloggerrachelmanija once described Koontz’s (extensive) body of work as follows: “...thrillers, some involving science fiction or fantasy, some just bad guys chasing people, with excessively wholesome protagonists, hilariously evil villains, and cute kids and pets. They are very good airplane reading.”
The hilariously evil villain of False Memory is a charming but corrupt psychiatrist who uses a combination of drugs and hypnosis to implant personality disorders in his patients, whom he then garners recognition for “curing.” (He uses the same methods to program assassins, to turn women into sexual playthings, and to engineer murders, suicides, and ritual abuse scandals.) He’s cartoonishly over the top, but if the reader adjusts their expectations, that could be a feature, not a bug. The paranoid sequence in which the main characters – a married couple – figure out that they’ve been programmed is very well written, as are the scenes in which circumstances force them to trigger each other’s programming. Unfortunately, the enjoyable premise buckles under the weight of several unnecessary subplots and tangents, the dire implication that benevolent mind control can cure drug addiction, and the baffling decision to – in the final third of a 600 page book – introduce a new character with no connection to the protagonists or the main plot, possibly so that she can dispatch the bad guy and they don’t have to get their hands dirty.
I could devote an entire essay to the tropes and narrative devices that recur every time Koontz writes about mind control (at least in the books that I’ve read). I once tried to map them out using a five-circle Venn Diagram. As far as I’m concerned, even among those five examples, False Memory has some of the highest highs and the lowest lows.
3. Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2007) by Brendan Halpin
Halpin starts with a very solid idea – a love story between two people whose lives derailed when their previous partners wrote angry breakup songs about them – and writes skillfully about grief, parenting, and self-reinvention, with some unexpectedly funny moments along the way. However, the last time I reread this book, I was repeatedly put off by the male lead’s interior monologues about Those Bitches Who Keep Choosing Jerks Instead Of Nice Guys Like Him. I think that it’s more than okay for a protagonist to have ugly or uncharitable thoughts sometimes, but they still weren’t fun to read. I was only slightly less offended by the same character’s horrified speculation about a future in which he doesn’t meet the right woman, and instead “settles for some socially awkward, unattractive girl who writes Buffy fan fiction in her spare time or something” or “might as well go buy some Dungeons and Dragons supplies, start eating prodigiously, and develop strong opinions about which is his favorite X-Man.” Excuse you, sir.
4. Sing You Home (2011) by Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult’s novels have a reputation for hot-button social and political issues (often hashed out in courtroom sequences), melodramatic storytelling dialed up to 11, late-story twists intended to induce shock, sadness, or both… and some indefinable page-turning quality that prompted me to devour a sizeable percentage of her back catalog throughout my twenties even though I recognized her bag of tricks fairly quickly.
Because those tricks recur so often in her body of work, I probably could have singled out any title as an example; the first one that I considered was My Sister’s Keeper. But at least, in that book, as in many of Picoult’s books, there are no clear-cut heroes or villains; the family members on both sides of the central conflict have sympathetic and understandable motivations. The antagonists of Sing You Home – an evangelical church that sues for “custody” over the embryos that one of their members conceived with his ex-wife, who hopes to use them to start a family with a same-sex partner – are conservative strawmen. Nothing about their portrayal is unbelievable, exactly: people with their opinions did and still do exist and have an unfortunate amount of institutional power, which can and should be criticized in fiction. Still, their over-the-top ignorance read as one more manipulative tool wielded by an author who already tended toward blatantly manipulative writing… and yet I reread this book more than one time, on purpose.
5. The Extraordinaries (2020-2022) by TJ Klune
Klune’s queer superhero trilogy displays his obvious affection for comic-book tropes, and offers likeable characters and plenty of humor (the fanfiction that protagonist Nick writes about his costumed crush is hilarious) along with some genuinely emotional passages. Some of the plot developments add layers to the Fridged Wife and Mother cliche, which I appreciate, and supporting characters with no super-powers have agency and interiority and importance to the plot, which I also appreciate. The series also has a charmingly amoral villain who, while not doing anything that Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn haven’t done before, is a perfectly enjoyable variation on a similar archetype.
But although most of the humorous and dramatic moments work in isolation, they don’t always hold together or balance each other believably. It’s not clear whether Klune wants his world to be grounded in recognizable human emotion and behavior, or to be constructed of comedy bits, some of which require more suspension of disbelief than teenagers with superpowers (when they’re not making me actively uncomfortable, as in the sequence that takes place at Nick's high school and involves some non-sexually inappropriate behavior on the part of his teachers). Once again, I don't believe that any adult is "too old" to be reading YA fiction in general, but I did sometimes feel like my age prevented me from relating to this series; although it probably has a lot to offer its presumed audience of queer teens, it loses me at least as often as it grabs me.
A. The pleasure of the book is “guilty” because I am not its target audience (children or young adults).
B. The pleasure of the book is “guilty” because I am its target audience and we’re socially conditioned to think of fiction marketed toward women as frivolous.
C. The book was good but the author Did A Problematic Thing (or was Insufficiently Marginalized to tell the story they were telling). Those conversations aren’t without value, but I’m much more interested in discussing the actual text.
Instead, I decided to look at titles that I enjoy even though I disagree with something fundamental about the creative choices that went into them.
1. The Chronicles of the Deryni (1970-2014) by Katherine Kurtz
I’ve written a lot – mostly on Tumblr – about Kurtz’s long-running fantasy series, and it definitely falls into the category of “I love this thing, but I don’t think everyone, even fans of the genre, should
2. False Memory (1999) by Dean Koontz
Author and book blogger
rachelmanija once described Koontz’s (extensive) body of work as follows: “...thrillers, some involving science fiction or fantasy, some just bad guys chasing people, with excessively wholesome protagonists, hilariously evil villains, and cute kids and pets. They are very good airplane reading.” The hilariously evil villain of False Memory is a charming but corrupt psychiatrist who uses a combination of drugs and hypnosis to implant personality disorders in his patients, whom he then garners recognition for “curing.” (He uses the same methods to program assassins, to turn women into sexual playthings, and to engineer murders, suicides, and ritual abuse scandals.) He’s cartoonishly over the top, but if the reader adjusts their expectations, that could be a feature, not a bug. The paranoid sequence in which the main characters – a married couple – figure out that they’ve been programmed is very well written, as are the scenes in which circumstances force them to trigger each other’s programming. Unfortunately, the enjoyable premise buckles under the weight of several unnecessary subplots and tangents, the dire implication that benevolent mind control can cure drug addiction, and the baffling decision to – in the final third of a 600 page book – introduce a new character with no connection to the protagonists or the main plot, possibly so that she can dispatch the bad guy and they don’t have to get their hands dirty.
I could devote an entire essay to the tropes and narrative devices that recur every time Koontz writes about mind control (at least in the books that I’ve read). I once tried to map them out using a five-circle Venn Diagram. As far as I’m concerned, even among those five examples, False Memory has some of the highest highs and the lowest lows.
3. Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2007) by Brendan Halpin
Halpin starts with a very solid idea – a love story between two people whose lives derailed when their previous partners wrote angry breakup songs about them – and writes skillfully about grief, parenting, and self-reinvention, with some unexpectedly funny moments along the way. However, the last time I reread this book, I was repeatedly put off by the male lead’s interior monologues about Those Bitches Who Keep Choosing Jerks Instead Of Nice Guys Like Him. I think that it’s more than okay for a protagonist to have ugly or uncharitable thoughts sometimes, but they still weren’t fun to read. I was only slightly less offended by the same character’s horrified speculation about a future in which he doesn’t meet the right woman, and instead “settles for some socially awkward, unattractive girl who writes Buffy fan fiction in her spare time or something” or “might as well go buy some Dungeons and Dragons supplies, start eating prodigiously, and develop strong opinions about which is his favorite X-Man.” Excuse you, sir.
4. Sing You Home (2011) by Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult’s novels have a reputation for hot-button social and political issues (often hashed out in courtroom sequences), melodramatic storytelling dialed up to 11, late-story twists intended to induce shock, sadness, or both… and some indefinable page-turning quality that prompted me to devour a sizeable percentage of her back catalog throughout my twenties even though I recognized her bag of tricks fairly quickly.
Because those tricks recur so often in her body of work, I probably could have singled out any title as an example; the first one that I considered was My Sister’s Keeper. But at least, in that book, as in many of Picoult’s books, there are no clear-cut heroes or villains; the family members on both sides of the central conflict have sympathetic and understandable motivations. The antagonists of Sing You Home – an evangelical church that sues for “custody” over the embryos that one of their members conceived with his ex-wife, who hopes to use them to start a family with a same-sex partner – are conservative strawmen. Nothing about their portrayal is unbelievable, exactly: people with their opinions did and still do exist and have an unfortunate amount of institutional power, which can and should be criticized in fiction. Still, their over-the-top ignorance read as one more manipulative tool wielded by an author who already tended toward blatantly manipulative writing… and yet I reread this book more than one time, on purpose.
5. The Extraordinaries (2020-2022) by TJ Klune
Klune’s queer superhero trilogy displays his obvious affection for comic-book tropes, and offers likeable characters and plenty of humor (the fanfiction that protagonist Nick writes about his costumed crush is hilarious) along with some genuinely emotional passages. Some of the plot developments add layers to the Fridged Wife and Mother cliche, which I appreciate, and supporting characters with no super-powers have agency and interiority and importance to the plot, which I also appreciate. The series also has a charmingly amoral villain who, while not doing anything that Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn haven’t done before, is a perfectly enjoyable variation on a similar archetype.
But although most of the humorous and dramatic moments work in isolation, they don’t always hold together or balance each other believably. It’s not clear whether Klune wants his world to be grounded in recognizable human emotion and behavior, or to be constructed of comedy bits, some of which require more suspension of disbelief than teenagers with superpowers (when they’re not making me actively uncomfortable, as in the sequence that takes place at Nick's high school and involves some non-sexually inappropriate behavior on the part of his teachers). Once again, I don't believe that any adult is "too old" to be reading YA fiction in general, but I did sometimes feel like my age prevented me from relating to this series; although it probably has a lot to offer its presumed audience of queer teens, it loses me at least as often as it grabs me.
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Date: 2025-05-29 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-30 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-30 03:20 pm (UTC)And oof yeah, 600 pages is indeed a lot...
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Date: 2025-05-29 06:56 pm (UTC)It seems like I enjoyed them more than you, but I wasn't always happy with the religious intrigue or willing to forgive the portrayal of female characters because of the religious aspect to the books and the pseudo-medieval setting.
I also sometimes joke that Alaric Morgan was written for me, personally, and I unironically love his relationship with his right-hand man, Derry, a whole lot.
Katherine has talked about it all having started with Alaric Morgan coming to her in a dream. ;-)
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Date: 2025-05-30 01:46 am (UTC)Katherine has talked about it all having started with Alaric Morgan coming to her in a dream.
I love that for her. :)
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Date: 2025-06-05 02:11 am (UTC)I'm glad! I've been in love with them a long time.
They're just a very uneven reading experience, and I'm genuinely happy for the people who can enjoy them more consistently.
I like the books set in Alaric's childhood or later best. I'm not as fond of the ones set earlier, but I've been into the series deeply enough and long enough to have things like her book strictly about Deryni magic, and the Deryni Archives.
I love that for her. :)
I thought you might. ;-)