You know you have them.
You keep them a secret, hide them from your friends, carry them in discreet quilted book covers, hide them in the bottom drawer of the nightstand.
When your friends see them in the house, you claim to be keeping them for someone else, never admitting you'd indulge in them yourself.
When night falls and your brain is whirling with the heady events of a busy day, you reach for them again and again, to take you away from this ugly world, to make your problems disappear, to help you forget your woes and transport you to a realm of magic, fantasy, and delight.
Guilty pleasures.
What's yours?
Continued below...
I've got a few myself.
Number one guilty pleasure is Stephen King. He's actually a damn good writer, but his books are invariably easy to read and gripping. They certainly do the job for taking me out of the place I'm in for a while, even if it's one I've read before, sometimes more than once.
Another of mine is Terry Pratchett. His Discworld books are the ultimate in escapism, containing humor, wisdom, compelling characters, and terrific plots. Pure, delightful, habit-forming candy.
My mom's guilty pleasure is mysteries. She loves them. I've never read many myself, other than Agatha Christie and the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency books. My younger daughter loves the Brian Jacques Redwall series. We share a passion for the Harry Potter series, too.
I've also been known to read, surreptitiously, a true-crime book or two. Kind of like slowing down for a car accident to see what happened, and see if you can see any blood or gore.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I positively devoured the "Destroyer" series by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy. I loved those books. I read them all up through at least #62, when Murphy and Sapir were still writing them. The series, to the best of my knowledge, is still going on but with other authors. They were fantastic escapism.
I'll leave you with some choice Terry Pratchett quotes, and with the question,
"What's your guilty pleasure?"
Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
-- (The Colour of Magic)
It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as "slightly foxed", although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.
-- (The Light Fantastic)
For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
-- (Equal Rites)
The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.
-- (Mort)
In fact, no gods anywhere play chess. They prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight to Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
-- (Wyrd Sisters)
"Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn."
-- (Small Gods)
Many an ancient lord's last words had been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh."
-- (Interesting Times)
Oh yeah, and what have you read lately, guilty pleasure or not?