Unpacking Guilty Pleasures: The Case for Reading Whatever You fancy

We all have books we love but feel the need to defend. So, why do we treat reading some novels as a crime against literature? Maybe it’s time to think about 'guilty pleasures' vs ‘respectable’ books and dive deep into the culture of literary judgement…
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What are your guilty pleasure books? The books that you know are terrible, but can’t put down? Anything you’ve read five times over but would disclaim your love for it with “I know it’s bad but…”
 
The ‘guilty pleasure’ seems to me a curious way to describes our relationship with certain books, and I think it’s worth unpacking a little more seriously. 
 
So, what is a guilty pleasure? 
 
Cambridge dictionary describes the term as “something you enjoy that you feel slightly embarrassed about or think you should not do, because most people do not think it is good.” 
 
If we think in literal terms, “guilty”, to me, implies doing something wrong - with a general sense of culpability for said wrongdoing - while “pleasure” connotes enjoyment, happiness and satisfaction. “Guilty pleasure”, then, seems a somewhat paradoxical term associating a negative action with a positive feeling.
 
Like many things, guilty pleasures are a socially constructed concept derived from how we and other people view and speak about them. When I spoke to a few of my friends and family about their guilty pleasure books, the most common phrases fell something along these lines: 
 
“I know it’s terrible but…”
“Don’t judge me but…”
“It’s so bad it’s good”. 
 
Their responses indicate that we speak about guilty pleasures in a way that’s distancing ourselves from the material, particularly our literary taste. We almost defend ourselves from the implied allegation that we actually think such a book is worthy of reading, reassuring people that we do, in fact, know better and that Twilight isn’t as prestigious a read as War and Peace. Paradoxically, maybe it’s a way to exemplify our good taste, saying “I may read this rubbish, but the fact that I know it’s rubbish proves that I actually do have good taste.” By saying a specific book, author or genre is ‘bad’, we’re signalling that we actually do have a much more refined collection of classics on our living room bookshelves and this particular book is an exception from our otherwise exemplary taste.
 
This, of course, is vastly different from the way we talk about books we’d consider more respectable. These conversations seem, to me, to vary from accomplishment – “I finished Dosteovsky!” - to obligation - “I really should read more classics” - but we rarely feel the need to distance our own taste from the novel or author we’re reading in the same way we’d talk about our guilty pleasure books.
 
A clear distinction emerges in the ways we describe our relationship with literature: some reading is proudly presented as time well spent, while other reading is admitted to almost apologetically. So why do we consider some categories of reading a better use of our time than others?
 
I think, at some point, we’ve created a segregation between productive and unproductive reading. Some books are seen as beneficial, and some are not. Reading more ‘respectable’ books is seen as a more valuable use of time because we feel like it educates us, broadens our perspectives, makes us think critically, intellectually challenges us or, simply, makes us feel more ‘well read’. Reading has become a method of self-improvement, and any books that do not contribute to this in a purposeful sense are considered timewasters, or an unproductive afternoon. And while these are all perfectly valid, and important, reasons to read, it makes me wonder where does enjoyment fit in?
 
There’s a critic named Arielle Zibrak who talks about guilty pleasure reading as “baths for the mind”. In her analogy, she talks about how we interpret the ‘point’ of doing something. As she describes, we take a bath because the point of a bath is the bath. There is no aspect of self-improvement, an end goal or an expectation to emerge from a bath more knowledgeable about bathing; it is simply an enjoyable experience, and the enjoyment is the point. 
 
What I like about her analogy is the permission it gives us to rethink our idea of what makes reading valuable. A bath may not teach us anything profound, but we don’t consider it an embarrassment, or an evening wasted. Similarly, if a supposedly ‘trashy’ novel is a source of emotional comfort or makes us laugh, even fleetingly, would we really consider it a complete waste of time? Perhaps the point of reading, in some circumstances, is the enjoyment we get from it. 
 
It makes me wonder if our definition of productivity is narrower than it should be. We readily accept knowledge, education and intellectual development as valuable outcomes of reading, so why would we not include pleasure on this list? I’d argue that most of us would probably agree that happiness and enjoyment are, in part, a sign of a life well-lived. So why are books labelled ‘guilty pleasures’ simply for bring us enjoyment? Shouldn’t making us happy count as something worthwhile for a book to do? 
 
To clarify, none of this is to suggest that all books are of equal literary quality; literary criticism exists for a reason, and some books can be derivative, badly written, poorly structured etc., while keeping us hooked. However, I don’t think we should dismiss reading for enjoyment as an unproductive use of time. Perhaps literary value comes in different forms, and books with frivolity and drama that make us desperate to turn to the next page are just as important in keeping the art of the novel alive as those bursting with complicated language and cultural nuance. Particularly as it’s the National Year of Reading, maybe 2026 is the year to ditch the literary snobbery, stop labelling novels as ‘guilty pleasures’ and read whatever makes us want to keep reading.
 
Happy Reading!
 
Hannah Grogan
​July 2026