Badge Books Blog

The bad bad books that read so well

The literary equivalent of junk food, I shouldn't love them. But oh, reader, I can't get enough
Cheeseburger and fries
The food equivalent of a Stephenie Meyer book ... cheeseburger and fries. Photograph: Chris Collins / Zefa / Corbis

Orwell wrote affectionately about the "good bad book", particularly the "escape literature" which provides "quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd moments". He included Sherlock Holmes and The Treasure Seekers in this classification (although the latter, to my mind, is a good book through and through). Now, I'm all for the good bad book – in fact I can think of nothing more idyllic than a long train journey, preferably steam-propelled, armed with such a volume and perhaps a G and T. But I'm also susceptible to the bad bad book – the literary equivalent of the double cheeseburger and fries. They offer nothing beyond the ephemeral gratification of chomping through them page by page and, inveterate rereader though I usually am, I've never been able to stomach any of them more than once. But I keep buying them, reading them, and taking them to the charity shop under cover of darkness. Why?

The catnip effect of one's most shameful reading secrets varies from author to author. I've expressed myself at some length about my disapprobation of Twilight – nevertheless, I read all four books because I had to know whether or not Bella would, in the end, become a vampire, and the "will she? won't she?" question kept me grimly reading myself into self-loathing. The sheer leadenness of the prose also exerted its own hypnotic effect. Bludgeoned into submission by phrases like "The black fire in his eyes was impossible to doubt", I trotted on, simultaneously aghast and resigned.

On the other hand, Agatha Christie's catnip ingredient is the paper-doll predictability of her casting. Each milieu must feature at least one girl with expensively outré clothing, who, notwithstanding her blasé woman-of-the-world demeanour, will anxiously hearken to the wise words of Papa Poirot, and frequently marry the reliably close-at-hand doctor if she doesn't turn out to be the murderess. Hastings will be an ass, Tuppence will bite off more than she can chew, and apparent paragons of respectability will have inherited murderous predilections from their notorious and long-lost parents. It's all deeply comforting, like jam roly-poly, especially when the reader's own world isn't obeying any of the rules.

What can I say, though, about the addictive factor of the CHERUB books? I read a couple while researching spy fiction for children, and foolishly thought that there would be an end of it. Now I find myself bare-faced and blushing in Borders, buying the ones my library doesn't stock as my inner accountant pushes steel-rimmed NHS-issue specs up her disapproving nose. Why am I shelling out £6.99 a book for double-spaced, large-type hormone-fests I'm never going to read again? Because, as a girl who grew up bookish and brotherless, there's something horrendously addictive to me now about sharing the mental landscape of a grubby, too-typical-for-words teenage boy. James's domestic fascinations – putting his hand down his girlfriend's top, racing souped-up golf buggies and getting into fights – interest me much more than the world-saving missions he's periodically dispatched on. I read on as might a prim Victorian zoologist cataloguing the extraordinary habits of a new, brightly-coloured, foul-smelling species of ape.

I feel slightly guilty for including Jonathan Kellerman in my cohort of bad bad book merchants, because his prose is well-crafted, and every so often a phrase will make me purr ("oddly comforting, like the stale breath of a favourite uncle"). Also, I feel as though I'm gradually gaining an education in psychology from his useful clinical snippets. Perhaps he can be upgraded to purveyor of good bad books. His catnip factor, though, isn't his elegant mastery of the simile or masterful deployment of the crucial symptom. It's his clothes. He writes about women's clothing with a gorgeous exactness, lingering lovingly on the silk knits and the Jimmy Choos, and his gentlemen sport tailored slacks that break perfectly over oxblood loafers, colour-coded pocket squares, and all manner of LA flamboyance. It's a world away from monochrome suits in rush hour.

What are your darkest secrets of the bad bad book, and why, in the face of censorious glances on the platform or outright demands of "How can you read that tripe?" from other halves, do you persist in them?

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