Sunday, February 27, 2011

My Guilty Pleasure

I've been indulging in one of my favorite guilty pleasures: reading chic-lit. I'm in the middle of a Susan Isaacs novel (As Husbands Go) and loving it. I'm also embarrassed that I love it, and that "The Middle Ages", written by an eminent scholar, is lying dusty by my bed. I tried to read it. And I really did like it. But it wasn't amusing. And I think the single most shallow thing about me (not the single, but the single most) is that I like to be amused.

Which is why, for example,  on Sunday mornings, I reach the for the Styles section of the NY Times first. Or the Week in Review, for the Laugh lines. Or the Magazine. My husband has, on more than one occasion, said, "going for the important stuff, first, huh?". That makes me see red. And be red.

I'll admit that I'm a little hypersensitive about this. A few weeks ago, after stocking up on novels at the library (and the sort-of-intellectual, "The Obama Diaries", which I've not yet cracked open), I was happily reading, "The Perfect Husband" (this was a Lisa Gardner crime/mystery novel, another one of my favorite genres). The  husband walked by and said, "you should be writing that". Mistaking his comment as a suggestion that I write rather than read, I snapped at him. He backed off (literally), saying ,"it was a joke. You know, the perfect husband...you should be writing it". Poor D. That would be the guilt in my guilty pleasure making me see things that aren't there. Plus living with a man who thinks fiction is a waste of time.

Anyway, the upside (for the part of me that wants to do more than waste my days reading novels) is that reading always makes me want to write. I actually want to write a novel featuring a Catholic middle-class wife/mom. The chic-lit genre is absolutely saturated with really wealthy Jewish wife/moms, so I think there's niche. The problem is, of course, that writing is not amusing. Reading is. And (*sigh*) I do like to be amused.

1 comment:

  1. Fr M most think I'm a painfully slow reader because the Ladder of Divine Ascent and Heliotropium are just plain ol collecting dust. Despressing.

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