Recommended Reading: Let’s All Have a Junky Spring Break!

KIM:

One of my top two favorite gifts I have given was Claire’s 40th birthday present. We had talked for years about the kinds of books we read and Claire is a big fan of the beach read, or to put it more bluntly, the trashy book. In honor of her reading choices, I bought a small trash can and filled it with the appropriate books. Decorated with balloons and tissue paper, books piled in and stacked up to keep the trash lid open, truly, the gift was a sight to behold. Unfortunately, neither one of us took a picture of it.

I received quite a few stares as I dragged the trash can through Duttons Bookstore, selecting the perfect books and trying to shove in as many as possible. It’s been a few years (actually I can’t remember how many years, but I do remember that it was during the baseball play offs and I would like to take this moment to once again remind Claire that I left a Dodger playoff game to attend your party), so I don’t remember all the books I picked, but here are some of my favorite poolside-thoroughly-enjoyable reads:

1. Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon – this is my favorite beach read! I think there are seven in the series, who knows, they seem to multiply like rabbits. Yes, she is in desperate need of an editor, yes, the series isn’t as good as it continues, but none of her fans care. This isn’t high literature, it’s fun and when Claire and Jamie are off on an adventure the world melts away.

2. Any Dan Brown book – Claire and I said we wouldn’t buy his latest book, it’s just not worth the money, but we’re so glad we received it as a gift. I’m scheduled to fly on a little plane to a third world country; with The Lost Symbol to distract me I’m sure not to drive my companions crazy questioning every little noise the plane makes.

3. The Josephine Bonaparte Trilogy (starting with The Many Lives and Sorrows of Josephine B.) by Sandra Gulland – great escapist historical fiction.

4. Tara Road by Maeve Binchy – This is the only Binchy I’ve read completely, the others I’ve dropped after a few chapters, but this book carried me through a terrible week with an insane boss and for that, I’m eternally grateful.

5. From my high school years I have fond memories of Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz and Kane and Abel by Jeffery Archer, both big rags to riches family sagas.

6. No Angel by Penny Vincenzi – The wonderful bookseller at Corner Bookstore in NYC recommended this book to me as the perfect antidote to two cranky kids and a wonderful companion for a cross country flight. She was right.

CLAIRE:

Kim’s gift was truly a pleasure to behold and then to enjoy.  A brilliant idea and one you should think about if you want to give a fun gift (but it does require two stops, since few bookstores stock small trashcans).   She totally got me hooked on Outlander and since I’m the crass one, I’ll go ahead and say that the sex scenes in that book are phenomenal and it was ultimately probably as much a gift for my husband who never read a word of it as it was for me.  Which brings me to an important point: I need romance and/or sex in my escapism.  Guns and plots don’t do it for me unless they’re wrapped around a romance.

And of course I loves me my fantasy . . .

1.  Anything by Robin Hobbs. I know few women my age share my passion for fantasy,  but it’s the genre I turn to first to escape real life. Robin Hobb’s trilogies are fantastic (especially the one that starts with Assassin’s Apprentice).   I actually saw a news story about a teenager with amnesia who the reporter said was carrying around one of Hobb’s books–experts were saying that she was so lost in the author’s created world that she lost her sense of reality.  I’m not making this up.  And I remember finishing the last of her nine book series (three trilogies really) and feeling like a door was closing on me and I wanted to stay.  I wanted to stay.  Pure entertainment, beginning to end.

2.  George R.R. Martin is similarly wonderful, but his series A Song of Ice and Fire DOESN’T END.  He just kind of stopped publishing in the middle of the saga.  Maybe he’ll start up again but when you start having five year long gaps between books, you risk losing readers.  He’s fun and enthralling though.

3. For true trash, there’s Jackie Collins, of course.  Haven’t read her in years, but I went through a big phase about twenty years ago and had me a ball.  The books are fun and they didn’t annoy me the way most books written to be amusing trash annoy me (usually because they’re badly written and cliched).

4.  Mary Renault’s books about ancient Greece and Rome.  I read her when I was a teenager and then again when I was an adult traveling to Europe.  Sexy fun with enough history and mythology to make you feel like maybe you haven’t wasted your time.  You probably have–but what a way to waste it.

5.  The Stieg Larsson books.  See?  I do occasionally read contemporary novels.   I liked Girl Who Played with Fire a little more than Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although Dragon was a little more romantic . . .  Anyway, the books are good solid trashy fun.

6.  Going back in time again: Ian Fleming’s James Bond books are magnificent.  I’m talking about the REAL Ian Fleming novels, the originals.  Sexy, harsh, tough, believably extreme and much better than the movies.  I used to reread them every summer and still do on occasion.  They don’t disappoint.

7.  Lauren Willig’s The Secret History of the Pink Carnation and I guess its sequels although I haven’t read them.  She does sex scenes REALLY well.  I always loved The Scarlet Pimpernel and while Willig is no Baroness D’Orczy, she . . .  does sex scenes REALLY well.  Enjoy.  (And by the way, if you ever blurb one of my novels for any reason, I’m happy with “does sex scenes really well” as the blurb.  Remember that.)

I could list more but I’m dead on my feet with exhaustion and we’re in crazy pre-break mode.  But this is fun.  I think Kim and I should get our hubbies to do this next and then we can do an analysis of what men look for in a trashy novel–plots?  peril?  tax fraud?  That last is my nod to Grisham whose exciting denouements always seem to involve . . . tax fraud. Woo-hoo.  I’ll take my sex scenes, thank you very much.

Anyway, have a great vacation–we intend to.  But before you go, let us know which trashy books you’d recommend to a fellow traveler searching desperately in the airport bookstore for something to transport her completely away from the inevitable screaming babies and seat-kicking toddlers.  And I know I’m going to think of a bunch more and be annoyed at myself for forgetting them, so look for future comments from me.