Summer Reading and Shame

Some people have problems admitting what they read. I've always been one of those people. I've always felt like my chosen reading material needed to meet some sort of standard. I think a lot of people feel like this; sure, we may proudly display the latest Toni Morrison, but we've all got a James Patterson or Janet Evanovich hidden away somewhere. Library school helped me to become less ashamed of my leisure reading pursuits. I still love a well crafted, nuanced novel that's got all the critics raving and the bookclubs clamoring for more copies, but I've also been able to get over some of this shame and start openly reading things that I just plain enjoy.

Summer is often the season of guilty pleasures and casual decadence--a margarita on a Tuesday, boats (!!!), eating so much watermelon you feel like you might puke. It also is "beach read" season as the NYTimes points out. For the first 21 years of my life, summer was a time when I decided to read 'the big ones.' The books I thought I should read and not the books that would actually make me relax. Some examples: Ulysses (Joyce), Middlemarch (Eliot), The Odyssey (Homer). I wish I was kidding. I wasted many a golden summer trying to slog through things I had no real interest in reading at the time.

Last summer, some friends and I started a romance novel book club. This gave us the opportunity to read hilarious, "trashy" books for a reason. It was a huge success (meetings over nachos and margaritas? Hell yes!) but met with a lot of resistance from some of my more "intellectual and philosophical" library school friends. They didn't get it, because we weren't being enriched by these books. My message: no reading is bad! Reading is an escape! Reading should be FUN!

So, this summer, I'm going to let my trashy read freak flag fly. I'm going to read whatever I want, without shame. I'll start out by letting you know that I've read three Janet Evanovich books in the last three days-- books 3, 4, & 5 of the Stephanie Plum novels. Number 6 is waiting to be packed into my beach bag, along with Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry. I've also got Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, but I think that can wait til next week.

So, what are your 'beach reads' this summer? Do you use summer as an excuse to read books openly that perhaps before were only read in the privacy of your bedroom?

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