Afternoon Delight

Tess Gerritsen has posted a wonderful blog about reading for pleasure.  A snippet:

It’s this childhood pleasure of reading that the lady in tweed suddenly remembered as she spoke to me that afternoon in the library.  She remembered the joy of books before she began listening to literary critics tell her what was good for her.  Before she let the tyranny of her book group dictate what she should read.  Before her well-heeled friends laughed at her collection of Danielle Steel.  she remembered the days when books were ice cream, not Brussels sprouts.  She has since been worn down, her love of books battered by the arbiters of literary taste.  But instead of merely driving her into the closet to read her romance novels in secret, it has done something far, far worse.

It has made her stop reading entirely.

This is the greatest cruelty of all.  It’s one committed every day, by every parent who frowns at the child who’s got his nose deep in a Dean Koontz novel.  By every bookseller who laughs at the pasty-faced men who linger near the science fiction shelves.  By every highbrow twit who says to a friend, “I’d never read that trash.”  Every single one of them is killing the soul of a reader.

Check out the rest of it.

As must be obvious by now, I’m a reading maniac.  I generally have at least three books going at once, and usually more.  I have passions for many kinds of reading,  too.  Women’s novels, of course (whatever that means–stories about women’s journeys) and excellent romances and good literary novels and Oprah books and travel tales and especially essays.  I like a gritty mystery now and then and adore a great thriller once in awhile and love a tragedy that breaks my heart correctly (not like say, oh, Cold Mountain).    I have taken ribbing from all sides about my tastes, but luckily, I’m a writer and allowed to be eccentric. 

Has anyone managed to make you take your tastes underground? And what have you read lately that you loved?  Maybe one of us will like it, too.