Dan Brown & Guilty Pleasures

In case you cared, time is moving way too fast in the little barnhouse here, and I am still wishing it away faster.  The snow on the ground has shown no signs of melting yet, it could just as easily be November again, with a whole winter of freezing cold ahead.  Yay.

That said, the last couple of days have been spent sitting by the living room's woodstove with my latest read.  In reading The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons I had to wonder if these are considered guilty pleasures by literary standards.  Now that I'm onto the latest in Robert Langdon's adventures, The Lost Symbol, it's occurred to me that I really don't remember a whole lot of any of those books, despite having read them sometime within the past year.  And more importantly, I probably wouldn't read them again, even though they were fun.  So there you have it ... right?

What do you think, what characterizes a guilty-pleasure read?  Is there any shame in reading whatever qualifies?  Do you tell your work friends about it, or pretend you're reading Ulysses instead?  Do you bring any books to work, or fear that your Ulysses-reading co-workers will react badly?  Personally I do take books to work, but I end up not reading them and playing on the net instead.  But if I did worry about such things, I certainly wouldn't take my nonfiction books because then I'd have to explain how I'm trying to be smart.  I might be questioned on the book or subject's contents, and this is just too much.  Read my blog, folks.  You feel me?