Guilty pleasures, everybody has a few

Yesterday, while taking a bit of downtime after my long working Saturday, I was watching some of Nostalgic Critic’s videos on Youtube. I came across his review of Moulin Rouge.

In his review he contends that Moulin Rouge is not a good movie as its plot is incoherent and its characters are one-dimensional. This leaves him puzzled as to why so many people liked Moulin Rouge. In the end he decides that most people like it because it is, in fact, a guilty pleasure. Anyone who stops for a moment to think about Moulin Rouge can immediately see that the plot is total nonsense. But almost everyone likes the movie because it’s loud, full of color and just plain fun. It’s fun to hear the mish mash of songs they make and how they play out the songs they use.

 

This got me thinking about what a guilty pleasure is, especially when it comes to the literary world. For me a literary guilty pleasure is reading a book that I know from the start is utter nonsense and that the premise of the book would never survive if I thought about it for longer than a minute. It’s usually a book that is not really bringing anything more to my life then the small moment of enjoyment I get when I read it.

 

There are a few authors that have books that fall into this category for me. One of the main ones is Edgar Rice Burroughs. Edgar Rice Burroughs as you know, or as I hope you know, is mainly known for his adventure tales, the most famous of which are the Tarzan novels.

 

The premise of the Tarzan novels of course is total nonsense: A human baby grows up in the jungle and not only survives but becomes super strong and lords it over the animals and evildoers alike. Admittedly the first two books in the series are the best. The later ones start to get a bit generic in their plotlines, characters and outcomes.

 

Outside of the above, the most jarring thing about the Tarzan series is the author’s views on race. The books were written back in the day when, to the public, the supremacy of the white race was an obvious thing and the author states this again and again matter-of-factly.  According to his biographer, John Taliaferro, Burroughs “believed in a hierarchy of race and class. In the Tarzan stories, blacks are generally superstitious and Arabs rapacious.” He also had strong views on men and woman as can be seen in the following snippet: “Jane saw the little note and ignored it, for she was very angry and hurt and mortified, but—she was a woman, and so eventually she picked it up and read it.”

 

This made me laugh when I saw the recent Tarzan movie and they had Tarzan as some sort of nature hippie at one with nature. In the books Tarzan is not at one with nature. He goes around killing everything in his path mostly for food but sometimes just because he doesn’t like a particular animal and he goes around killing the local black tribe, which of course are cannibals, with relish. He doesn’t talk with the animals. The only animals Tarzan ever talked with was his tribe of apes in ape language. The only lion he ever had was one he decided to raise from a cub after he kills its mother as an experiment. He also never apologized for anything nor did he get his ass kicked by anything other than occasionally getting overwhelmed by fifty opponents. Usually after they had cheated and snuck up on him.

 

Still despite all its errors, the Tarzan books are well-written and enormously fun to read, so I reread them every so often indulging in my guilty pleasure.

 

Of more modern writers I would go with John Ringo as my guilty pleasure. John Ringo is a pretty good sci-fi writer with a few good series under his belt if you like military sci-fi. His best work I think is the Legacy of the Aldenata series and of course the classic Legacy of Man series he co-authored with David Weber.

 

His more recent work has taken a different path with the paladin of shadow series and black tide series. Not wanting to get into spoilers, let me just say that in the first book of the paladin of shadow series his protoganist kills a lot of terrorists, rescues about fifty naked coed and even kills Osama bin Laden as well as the President of Syria. And that’s just in the first third of the book. There’s another aspect to these books I’ll let you discover on your own if you read them. His black tide rising series is about a zombie apocalypse and it’s pretty good as far as zombie apocalypses go (I often have a hard time taking those seriously) but even so a lot of the content of the four books in the series, as Geoffrey Rush’s character says in the third Pirates of the Carribean movie, “stretches credulity.”

 

Still they are fun and if you want to read a story of a family kicking ass in a zombie apocalypse you can’t go wrong with it. One thing John Ringo can write well is action and humor. At least his books aren’t as depressing as watching “The walking dead.”

 

Feel free to share in comments what book is your guilty pleasure.