SF Signal: What's Your Guilty Pleasure?

What's Your Guilty Pleasure?

I'm not a reading snob.

I've talked before about the guilty pleasures of reading:

I do enjoy the guilty pleasures of reading. While reading literary works make me feel virtuous, other writing often re-injects the fun back into sf. In the end, it's the reading experience that is paramount, of which the book's writing style is only a part. (It's the same guilty pleasure I derive from Star Wars. It's not Shakespeare, but it's fun.)

Besides The Executioner series and Star Wars, I might also add to my list of guilty pleasures the Perry Rhodan series. I haven't read any in while, but I remember these being fun in a corny, how-will-they-top-themselves-next kind of way. I like to think that their literary value was lost somewhere in the translation from their original German, but in the back of my mind, I know it's a dignity-preserving lie.

I hope I'm not the only one who's not afraid to fess up! C'mon, share you guilty pleasure. Any Pel Toro fans out there?

My guilty pleasure is reading Shadow novels by Maxwell Grant aka Walter Gibson. My personal favorites are THE SHADOW'S SHADOW, GRAY GHOST, DEATH TOWER, THE ROMANOFF JEWELS, THE DEATH GIVER, GANGDOM'S DOOM and, of course, any novel with Shiwan Khan.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does NOT pay. The Shadow knows.

The Batman and all other dark avengers of the night follow in the footsteps of this towering and mysterious pulp hero.
JCW

Posted by John C. Wright on Tuesday May 31, 2005 at 12:31 PM