LitRPG novels by almost anyone are trash but a sort of trash that really hooks into my deep-seated love of levelling up and getting new powers and toys.
I guess maybe Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger series? They’re real formulaic and I sometimes roll my eyes at particular beats of that formula, but it’s always kinda fun seeing him take on weird mad science terrorism renditions of classic monsters and the like.
Not too much else probably. I’m real sensitive to bad writing, which is why I cannot stand Dan Brown even though he’s certainly fast-paced and good at prompting you to keep reading, for example. It’s only really LitRPG that gets too much past that filter for me.
The concept of guilty pleasures is alien to me. I went back to my bookshelf to see if I could find any books I’ve read that inspire any feelings of guilt and I really can’t. If I enjoyed or got some sort of edification from it, then reading was a positive experience. I’ve certainly read some crap in my time but then I wouldn’t really say I derived much pleasure from it so that certainly wouldn’t count. So uh, nobody I guess is my answer.
Even somebody like Stephen King is someone who has certainly written some stuff that probably isn’t up to what he would consider his own standard. But I do think that he has skill as a writer, as a storyteller, that even those books that weren’t really all that good - maybe The Tommyknockers, just to pick one at random - had some interesting ideas and was reasonably well presented. But, some folks might consider Stephen King a guilty pleasure so, maybe him?
I think King is probably the closest I have to a guilty pleasure, too. I tend to be pretty sensitive to bad writing, so I have a really hard time sticking with that kind of stuff. Unless it’s something I’m reading along with for the 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back podcast, where that’s part of the charm.
LitRPG and Japanese Light Novels. I also like Military SciFi. Myth Adventures and Phules Company by Robert Asprin - I will re-read every so often. Same goes for Glen Cook’s Garret PI series.
Stephen King: I know he’s not very good, but his early novels are compulsively re-readable. Especially like The Shining, Salem’s Lot, Christine, It, etc.
Not sure it really qualifies, but I’ve read Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr series at least twice each.
I’ve been tempted to buy Magic the Gathering or D&D novels many times. To date, I’ve always made my saving throw.
I just read Salem’s Lot for the first time a year ago. My older brother used to read all of King’s stuff, read Lot back in the late 70s, and while reading it myself I vividly recalled a convo with my brother as he described some of the town’s minor characters and how they were his favorite aspect of the book.
I understand it better with, say, games. I mean, there are a lot of things objectively wrong about the design of Assassin’s Creed games but I tend to enjoy them anyway, I think of that as the definition of a “guilty pleasure.”
With books, I really can’t think of anything I’d call objectively bad that I enjoy. There are certainly plenty of things I like that others don’t, or even a majority of others don’t, but “guilty” implies there’s something genuinely wrong with it or embarrassing about it and I’m coming up empty there.
