Category Archives: guilty pleasures

March 11, 2016   Amy Bishop   audience, fun, guilty pleasures, romance  
1

To know them is to love them

As a middle schooler and beyond, I had some very serious crushes on fictional characters. Considering that I spent the majority of my free time wrapped up in a fictional world, this probably comes as no surprise. In college (and to this day, to be quite honest), Jamie Fraser from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander was my huge fictional crush. (The Starz series with Sam Heughan starring as Jamie only made it worse.)  I also had a big thing for Numair from Tamara Pierce’s The Immortals series and pretty much all of Jane Austen’s male characters. The thing that made me love all of these characters was their soft spots. They might be brusque on the outside, with some very major flaws, but at the end of the day, they were deeply caring and perfect gentlemen.
In the spirit of some lighthearted Friday fun, I decided to poll the DGLM office and find out who were the fictional characters they were most attracted to. Results below!

  • ​Michael: Mr. Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for his unattainable nature.
  • Lauren: Laurie from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for his impetuous and willful spirit.
  • Mike: Louisa from Jojo Moyes’s ​Me Before You for her sweet, tough, and caring character.
  • Sharon: Gilbert Blythe from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, for being in love with Anne for her personality and ideas, not just her looks—and the fact that his feelings for her didn’t get in the way of being a good friend.
  • Kemi: George Knightley from Jane Austen’s Emma, for his compassionate character and his long friendship with her, despite his romantic feelings.
And lastly, one of our interns, Chrissy chose Jay Gatsby, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for his wealth, his passionate love for Daisy, and his attraction to Nick (and also, because Leonardo DiCaprio).
Who’s the most attractive fictional character in your opinion? What do you think makes a fictional character attractive? What specific traits make our hearts melt every time we read about them?
January 29, 2016   Amy Bishop   Amy, fun, guilty pleasures, Twitter  
1

#snackbooks

From an early age, my father started training me in the art of noticing terrible, terrible puns. Like, truly awful. My mom was very good at tuning them out (and remains so) with a good roll of the eyes or shake of the head. I, on the other hand, started noticing them. And making them myself. So when I stumbled upon Tim Federle’s TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD in McNally Jackson last summer, I laughed myself sick.

Luckily, I am not alone in my sick sense of humor. Yesterday, Barnes & Noble started a game on Twitter called #snackbooks, combining food and books (two of my favorite things!). They contributed “Wafflehouse-Five” and “A Guac to Remember.” They got a significant number of responses. Some of my favorites included:

Life of Pie

Munch Ado About Nothing

War and Peas

The Lion, the Witch, and the Warheads

As I Lay Frying

….there are also countless others, but go check out their Twitter page here to see some of the other contributions. (Some enthusiasts even designed covers!)

My personal contributions are:

The Sound and the Fry
Alice in Waffleland
Anne of Green Gobbles
Feast of Eden

What would some of your #snackbooks titles be? 

January 26, 2016   sharon   guilty pleasures, reading, Sharon, winter  
1

Reading through Jonas

IMG_7527This weekend a winter storm poured snow all over the East Coast, bringing 27 inches to my neighborhood and as much as 30 elsewhere! Most in my circle on Twitter seemed to be rejoicing at the “snow day” (though is it really a snow day if it falls on a weekend??) to read, snack, and watch Netflix. Instagram was full of people’s cozy blanket piles, pots of soup, and cups of cocoa steaming next to a stack of books.

What interested me most, though, was the celebration of the “excuse” to stay home and catch up on reading. Being something of a homebody, I frequently spend one or both weekend days holed up to read no matter the weather, so Jonas was less of an excuse and more of an atmospheric backdrop. So I am curious about those bookworms for whom this was a deviation from their usual weekend routine. Do they simply have more dynamic social lives than I do? Do they make more brunch/theater/museum plans thus putting me to shame as a New Yorker and cultural citizen by comparison? I thrive on long hours in silence, alone, to counterbalance the busyness of the work week and the stimulation of the social engagements – I figured a lot of avid readers feel this way but perhaps my introversion is more rare than I thought.

What’s keeping us from making every Saturday a snow day?

January 15, 2016   Amy Bishop   Amy, guilty pleasures  
2

Reading in Bars (and other places too)

During my senior seminar class in college, one of the guest speakers mentioned that his favorite spot to read was a bar. Hmm, I thought. Reading in a bar. Seems awfully distracting.  But this summer, I tried it. I’ve newly started carrying a book around with me everywhere I go—something that was habit all the way up through high school, and then when I got to college, fell by the wayside. There were too many other things for me to be carrying around in my bags and spare moments between class, extracurriculars, and social time were few and far between.

I went to a bar I’d wanted to try, ordered a drink, and sat the very end of the bar and started reading Paradise by Toni Morrison. Oddly, the background noise was soothing instead of distracting, I mindlessly munched on bar snacks, and an hour later, paid my bill and went home, having finished a good chunk of my book. Since then, I’ve tried to get to bars or restaurants a little early if I’m meeting friends—for the sole purpose of whipping out whatever book I’m currently reading and getting another chapter further.

Where are your favorite, odd places to read? What’s the best atmosphere for you to read in? (For more Friday fun, check out this Instagram that documents some great subway reading. And anyone under 21 who’s reading this, don’t try this until you’re of legal age, please.)

October 22, 2014   Miriam   fiction, fun, great books, guilty pleasures, Miriam  
1

I’ll take mine with a twist

TwistI’m still reeling from Atonement.  Charlotte Brontë destroyed me with Villette.  And, I’m glad the Huffington Post agrees that Liane Moriarty’s bestseller ends with a, well, twist because I was bowled over.

Thing is, I hate surprises.  Really, I do.  I actually break out in hives at the thought of a surprise birthday party.  Whether the surprise is good or bad is irrelevant.  I don’t like to be there when it’s happening.  My peripatetic childhood, which involved periodically arriving in a new place whose culture (and even language) I didn’t understand made me wary of the unexpected.   That, combined with my type-A, OCD nature makes me dread anything I can’t see coming from a good distance.  (I will be taking all of this up in therapy some day, do not fear.)

As a result, I am one of those rare people who also appreciates a certain amount of predictability in my reading.  Rather than finding a book whose ending I can intuit or guess at a waste of time, I enjoy being able to focus my attention on the author’s prose, character development, and attention to detail.  I like category fiction because it generally follows a formula and it’s the skill of the author at things other than surprising us that tends to set these works apart.

So, of course, it irks me no end to admit that some of my most memorable reading experiences have involved not just a surprise ending but a shocking one.  My initial response is usually rage and confusion, followed, after a while, by admiration at the author’s ability to yank the rug so forcefully out from under me.  It’s so hard to pull off, but when it’s done right, it tends to make the narrative it closes unforgettable—especially when the finale seems organic and not gimmicky.  I hate surprises but I tend to end up loving books that surprise me.

What are your favorite surprise endings?  And why?

May 07, 2014   John   fun, guilty pleasures, inspiration, John  
1

When all else fails…

So, it’s Tuesday night, you’ve totally blown past your deadline for posting to the blog, you’re completely blocked, and nothing on-line gives you any substantial ideas. What do you do?

 You do this:

2014-05-06-ColbyProcyk1

You’re welcome.

P.S. Now that you’ve wiped your eyes, get out another Kleenex and check out the accompanying article about how an animal rescue center has kids read to stray cats to help the cats get socialized for adoption, and how it helps kids become better readers, too. How warm is your heart now?

P.P.S. Interestingly, the program is based in Berks County, PA, which has a storied literary pedigree: John O’Hara, Wallace Stevens and John Updike all came from towns in Berks County. And it must be noted that the hub of Berks County is the city of Reading–okay, it’s pronounced “Redding,” but still…

October 25, 2013   Rachel   coffee table books, fun, gift books, guilty pleasures, Rachel S.  
0

Too much or not enough?

It’s my best friend’s birthday this weekend. I’ve known this girl since we were both twelve, so needless to say, we’ve had some birthday practice since then. And presents practice. I don’t know when or why, but several years ago, I started gifting her with tacky or overly sentimental animal-themed coffee table books to go along with whatever real present I got her. I’ll admit I stopped doing this once we both moved to Brooklyn and started sharing an apartment…self-preservation?

I wish we had a gorgeous, spacious, display-possible apartment in which to showcase an enormous collection of books whose purpose isn’t so much to be read, but more to flip through while bored, amuse guests or serve as some other kind of curiosity whether for conversation’s sake or whatever else. Then I would just keep filling our lives with conversation pieces and coffee table décor, though I might branch out into non pet or baby animal related material, too.

It’s been some time since I’ve gifted a new silly book and I think it’s a tradition I’d like to reawaken (she says once before forgetting about it come Christmas). It all started with Rachael Hale’s 101 Cataclysms soon followed by her equally adorable 101 Salivations and moved on to various books detailing absurd dog houses (sorry, palaces), various babies at the zoo and a personal favorite in which you simply picked which of a pair of cats shown was the cutest and then moved on to the next page and pairing.

As you can see, it’s easy to get overwhelmed! When books are produced just based on a concept of cuteness, wackiness, beauty or what have you, things can get out of hand. Sure, a book consisting solely of photos of pretty front doors in the countryside (just riffing here, but I’ll put a bet down that such a book exists) is a marketable concept and I’m sure enough people would buy it to give it a shot, but where do you stop? How do you choose? I ask this of both publishers and book buyers. When do you put your foot down and call a halt to the hundreds of coffee table book ideas surely pitched each day or, on the other side of the coin, how on earth do you decide which one to buy? I can’t tell you the sheer volume of photos of kitties I looked at before settling on Cataclysms (it may also have had something to do with the title).

Okay, I need to stop now or I’ll just keep going and get carried away (the first time I uttered this statement today was roaming the aisles of Party City, which offered a surprisingly similar bombardment of color, sparkle, cuteness and choice), but how do you feel about books that seem to exist just for the heck of it? And if you’re pro these books, do they ever make it to your home, or is their sole purpose exhausted after one flip-through, a chuckle and an “aww” in the bookstore?

CUTE DOGS ARE CUTE

To be honest, I have “read” this book on more than two occasions.

 

August 06, 2013   mhoogland   advice, audio, fun, guilty pleasures, Mike H, opinion, reading, recommendations, suggestions, timing  
3

Look ma’, no hands!

Lately, I’ve been reading with no hands. Well technically I’ve been listening with no hands, but that’s a far less impressive feat. Essentially, I’ve become an audiobook junkie.

Many of my colleagues have asked for recommendations about what to read on vacation. Suggestions range, but notice the common element here? Vacation. There’s a reason people read a lot on vacations. It’s relaxing, it’s enjoyable, and I can’t stress this enough: people have the time.

But what about if you just can’t find the time to pick up a book during the work week? What if you’re like me and you wake at 5:00 am, go to the gym, head off to work, head home, eat dinner, and then go to bed?

I’ve found that audiobooks are actually very enjoyable to listen to, and they’ve quenched my thirst to read quite nicely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the same, but my morning workouts, commute, and dinner are now all enjoyed while “reading.” Suddenly, I have all the time in the world to enjoy a good book. Granted, some genres are generally easier to listen to than others, but that’s a topic for another post.

How about you guys? Ever listen to an audiobook? I’m currently looking for my next good listen. Suggestions?

April 17, 2012   Brenna   Brenna, crafts, guilty pleasures, trends  
3

Pinterested

Lately, my life has been a wild ride of work and planning. Planning what, you might ask? In the next four months, I’ll be moving into a new apartment and getting married (yep, I haven’t even sent the invitations yet). I mention this, because I have been hopelessly obsessed with Pinterest, an alarmingly fast growing social media site that I’m pretty sure was made for the bride-to-be. Nothing makes an hour+ commute go by like discovering all the cool stuff you can do with…well, anything. A sponge. An egg. A newspaper. Then, one day, I discovered Random House’s site. Jane Austen nerds rejoice–there’s a whole “board” full of neat Austen related ideas! There’s really no sense in me listing every last board (Literary tattoos! Amazing places to read!), because let’s face it, if you don’t see for yourself, you’ll seriously regret it. My two personal favorites are Literary Wedding (for obvious reasons) and Bookshelf Envy. What are yours? Do you know of another literary inspired board I should follow?

October 12, 2011   Miriam   characters, fiction, fun, gender, guilty pleasures, Miriam  
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Hot messes

I’ve been reading a fair amount of category fiction lately, in part because that’s what seems to be working in the e-publishing universe at the moment.  As a result, I’m encountering tons of literary clichés, chief among them the dark, brooding, tortured hero with flowing mane, abs of steel and damaged-but-still-beating heart of gold—your typical romance hero, in other words.  And we all know who was responsible for these prototypes…that crazy old storyteller Homer.  Nah.  Despite how hunky and troubled Hector, Achilles, and Odysseus are, it was the “lady writers” who really turned this type into a cottage industry.  If you think about it, there’s a direct line from Austen and Bronte to Stephenie Meyer and Eloisa James (sorry, the latter don’t rate single names yet; maybe in a century or two) and the swooning readership that fell in love with Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff when they were hot off the presses (no pun intended) was probably not all that different from the one that has made Twilight into an international phenomenon.  I’m not the only one who says so, either.

But, what about the less than dreamy heroes?  The Raskolnikovs and Yossarians? The neurotic and often substance abusing characters in Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels?  The angst-ridden suburbanites of Updike and Cheever?   I mean, sure, they’re hot messes, for the most part, and most do not have washboard abs.  But, aren’t they just a little sexy too?  Or is it just me?

Who are your swoon-worthy literary heroes?   And, do you prefer tall, dark and handsome or short, insecure and funny?

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