Summer Reads

Before you run off to the beach, you might want to take a look at this week's Time magazine for some suggestions of what to read. They poll sixteen writers to find out what their guilty pleasures are. Never mind that a few of these authors might be classified guilty pleasures themselves. Jane Smiley (first up at the link above) has an intriguing choice that might not quite be beach ready: Justine by the Marquis de Sade. Smiley said that, although the book "fully lived up to its reputation for cruelty and wholesale sexual perversion," she appreciated it for the power of the main character, "who always summons the strength to get away, always summons the resilience to question her fate and argue with the men when they justify tormenting her. Summing up, Smiley writes:

It may be that for De Sade, Justine's journey was primarily an excuse to catalog ways of enjoying doing harm, but for me, it turned into a wholesale exposure of how women and girls were exploited then and are exploited now—and exposure is the first step to redress.

Another interesting guilty pleasure is Janet Evanovich's choice of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comics, about which she refuses to feel guilty. "Joss Whedon, the man, the myth, the legend, writes the comic with the same genius as he did the show," she writes. She also admits, "I've read all four installments of The Long Way Home, and I'm cracking my knuckles and pacing in my office waiting for more." Well, that's what you sign up for when you start reading serial fiction.

The most unexpected item on the list comes from an author who is in no danger of being labeled a guilty pleasure: Joyce Carol Oates. Her pick is Mad magazine, and she refuses to feel guilty, too. "But why 'guilty'? No one who admires Mad magazine really feels the need to apologize or defend himself." Calling the magazine over the years "wonderfully inventive, irresistibly irreverent and intermittently ingenious," she also mentions some of the things she knows about the magazine, including "that the fatuously grinning Alfred E. Neuman with his perennial query ('What, me worry?') prefigured the improbable presidential cartoon character George W. Bush many years later." The fifteen other authors have an ID line that does nothing more than announce their most recent or upcoming book. Not Oates; in the spirit of Mad, her bio includes a challenge:

Oates' most recent book is The Gravedigger's Daughter. Anyone who can find the merest trace of Mad in this novel will receive a gift from the author.

I expect a rush on bookstores tomorrow as everybody starts competing to find out what that gift might be.