Polite Dissent

All this recent talk of Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code brings us to today’s topic: books and book series you’re embarrased to admit that you read. These are books that are poorly written, poorly conceived, improbably plotted, and more. These are books that would cause you unending shame if your friends, or God forbid your English teacher, caught you reading them. Yet, you still keep reading these books.

Of course, many of these books end up on the best-seller list.

I actually keep a stack of books in my room that I call the “Guilty Pleasure Pile.” I’ll read these books on long airline trips or dreary rainy days. Currently, the pile contains books from the following series:

Tom Clancy’s Net Force series.. Of course it’s not written by Clancy, it’s his “idea.” It was even turned into a made-for-TV-movie (or started out as a movie, it’s unclear), so that should tell you something about the series’s quality. The characters are all two-dimensional, and the villains inconsistent: an evil genius one book, rampaging rednecks the next. Still, it’s an addictive read.

Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt books. The best poorly written books available. These adventures follow the heroic marine salvager/scientist Dirk Pitt and his motley band of friends as they face various evils throughout the world. The best are To Raise the Titanic, Cyclops, Treasure, and Sahara. All of Cussler’s books, somewhere in the story, contain some variant of this long cliched line: “If only he had known what was about to happen, he never would have…”. My dad and I both read these books, and will call each other chuckling as soon as we spot this line in his latest book.

Xanth books. Jumped the shark so long ago. Would you feel comfortable in an airport reading a book called The Color of her Panties?

Robert Adams’s Horseclans series. This started wonderfully with an intriguing future setting, exciting — if two-dimesnsional characters, and non-stop well-plotted action. The series quickly degenerated into cardboard characters, redundant action sequences, and an “all but the kitchen sink” approach. Oh yeah, and incest.

John Norman’s Gor series.. Started out as a decent pastiche of ERB’s Barsoom series, but quickly degenerated into a misogynistic mish-mash. Think no man can have more issues with women than Dave Sims? Read John Norman. Actually physically painful to read by the end.

Robert Parker’s Spenser books. These are actually more of a pleasure than a guilty pleasure, as Parker writes well in his pulp noir style. The character are believable, and the mysteries generally quite good. It’s in the “guilty pleasure pile” because I pick them up in airport bookstores, so they end up in the same pile. (In terms of the TV version, I prefer Joe Mantegna as Spenser over Robert Urich, but Avery Brooks made the best Hawk, hands down).