My favorite flavor of mind candy

Yesterday when we dropped off our kids for soccer practice, my friend Amy handed off the latest J.D. Robb to me. This one is entitled Strangers in Death. Despite chauffeuring duties (lighter this week, because the kids are on spring break) and children and animals needing to be fed, I spent much of the afternoon reading it and had it all read by the time I had to leave for symphony rehearsal.

I have loved this series since Amy passed off the first ones to me, and there are now 26 of them. They're murder mysteries (hence the "death" titles), but they take place in a New York City of the future, described like this in the very first book (Naked in Death): "Street, pedestrian, and sky traffic were miserable, choking the air with bodies and vehicles....Even at this hour there was steam rising from the stationary and portable food stands that offered everything from rice noodles to soydogs for the teeming crowds." When the main character, Eve, sees the murder victim, she also is shown the murder weapon: " 'Thirty-eight caliber,' he told her. 'First one I've seen outside of a museum. This one's a Smith & Wesson, Model Ten, blue steel.' He looked at it with some affection. 'Real classic piece, used to be standard police issue up until the latter part of the twentieth. They stopped making them in about twenty-two, twenty-three, when the gun ban was passed.' "

The series has details about the future and also about Eve's life and the lives of her circle of friends and fellow cops, so it's the kind of series you need to start reading at the beginning (like Elizabeth George's Lynley mysteries or Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan mysteries). You find out that jobs of the future include "Licensed Companion," (a respectable prostitute, kind of like Inara in Firefly) and "Professional Mother" (one who gets paid by the government for doing a good job!). And you get Eve's cop-thinking about what motivates people: "Marriage is a promise....If you break one part of the promise, it's going to crack other parts." When the crime-fighting characters find out that an abused woman has been part of a murder plot, one of them tries to convince Eve to go easy with her: "There's a difference between weak and evil." Eve's reply is "Yeah, but there's sure a lot of overlap."

Each book has been just as good as the last, despite the growing narrative problem of Eve's life and the lives of all her friends becoming increasingly happy and settled. I like the way Eve can fly off to another planet or a tropical beach after she solves each mystery.

Guilty Pleasures

Since I read everything and am not big on guilt, I have few guilty pleasures as far as books go. The things I check out of the library and read just for fun (recently: Paretsky's Bleeding Kansas, Keillor's Pontoon, the Davidson catering mystery I already mentioned, and mysteries by Laura Lippman, Margaret Maron, and David Baldacci) aren't really guilty pleasures; they're just mind candy. I learned to enjoy mystery novels in the last few years, so there are still more of them I've not read.

My car books are guilty pleasures, though. I know this because one time a male person who teaches Sociology at OSU came by my car while I was waiting for a kid to come out of school, and I was a little embarrassed to respond to his genial "what are you reading?" Car books are paperbook romance novels that my friend Amy's mother passes along. I keep one or two under the seat of my car at all time so I always have something to read in an emergency, like a longer-than-anticipated wait or forgetting to take a book with me. Car books are the kind of books that you can read for a while happily enough but don't have to take in the house to finish. More than just embarrassing, though, car books can actually be bad for you. If you read enough stories about women getting romanced by rich and powerful men, your own life suffers by comparison, no matter how good it is. Also, the farther back in history the romance is set, the more passive the female character has to be. Amy and I can tell when her mother is more depressed than usual, because we start getting more 16th-century Scottish highlands romances with pictures of Fabio bare-chested on the covers. When her mother cheers up, we get Jennifer Crusie, set in the present day, and J.D. Robb, set in the future. (Note: these last two are good enough to take in the house and finish. I went out to the car to see what my current books under the seat are, and they're Belva Plain's Secrecy and Katherine Kingsley's The Sound of Snow.)

Besides romance novels, there are other books that are guilty pleasures because they're bad for you. Some fantasy novels are like that. I'm talking about the ones marketed to the "young adult" audience, like the Sword of Shannara, itself the best of a bad genre--and it has lots of lesser imitators. Bad fantasy has two dimensional characters, no rules (and often no limitations) for the magic, and it promotes the idea that violence solves all problems by showing that the only way to defeat evil is to be stronger than the evil.

Ron mentions action/adventure books that feature lots of testosterone-fueled explosions and some tactical thinking as guilty pleasures for men. I asked if he meant co-authored books with Tom Clancy, and he said those were the best of the genre, and there are lots of worse examples. I'm guessing that the bad thing about these books is that your own life suffers by comparison--it's less exciting, and you're less powerful in it.

So I'd like to know--what other kinds of guilty pleasures are available? Do you have a favorite that I haven't mentioned here? And why should you feel guilty about reading it?