I’m not sure I agree with all of the author’s conclusions, but it was a quick, fun read. I’m a fan of books on books (and media in this case), and this one was pretty good.

I loved this title, and I suspect I would like all the titles in the Avidly Reads series, which treat topics seriously, but not in a way that's beholden to conventions of academic publishing or supposed rigor. But I especially enjoyed Guilty Pleasures! How do the cultural works we classify as guilty pleasures help us to endure the world as it is while simultaneously working toward another? How does guilt actually sharpen or deepen the experience of pleasure? I'll be thinking about the arguments in this title for a while, while I read whatever I damn well please.

This book was sent to me as an ARC by NetGalley. However, all opinions are of my own.
This book was a lot more academic than I thought it would be, having said that it was okay.
I feel like some of the chapters were just thrown together about random subjects when I expected the book to be based on other books. I found it quite confusing and therefore was unable to connect with the book.

I'm biased because I loathe the phrase "guilty pleasure," but romance is my jam and this book was a lot of fun. Highly recommend for libraries needed a middle of the road, academic look at a popular genre.

In this delightful short book (really an extended essay), Zibrak breaks down and reclaims the idea of the "guilty pleasure," paying particular attention to its link to the femme identity and experience (Zibrak is wonderfully inclusive in her writing about gender). I think anyone who's grown up feeling shamed (even quietly) for liking romcoms or romance novels or anything society labels "girly," will instantly relate to how Zibrak examines shame and pleasure, as well as the way those feelings are inextricably linked to femininity in our society. I'd call this a must-read for anyone living in a patriarchal society, especially if you've ever wondered why your friend likes (or why you yourself life) torrid bodice-rippers and other "trashy" entertainment. Zibrak's prose tends toward an academic tone, so it may take more effort to parse if you're not used to reading literary criticism, but it's a short read, and I promise it's worth it.

My thanks to NetGalley and NYU Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! This book was phenomenal! I was initially skeptical when a friend recommended I read this, because I didn't feel like I really engaged with many traditional "guilty pleasures", but I felt like so many of the insights in this book were looking directly into my brain.
That being said, I looking forward to seeing reactions from people who don't feel like they connect with the content so much.

I really enjoyed this reflection on 'women's' literature and media. I found myself frequently nodding along with the author. I would read more by this author.

I'm not usually one to choose "political" type books but I am glad i picked this one up. I enjoyed how the essays were written and it did make me realise some things and how everyone has difference views on life in general. A guilty pleasure has always made me feel like society are choosing what I like and dislike and this book basically gives you a no care what people say attitude towards it.

In her introduction to Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak mentions a moment in her childhood when she stood in front of her 5th grade class to present a report on Nabokov's Lolita - the entire sexualized aspect having passed blithely over her, she understood it as "the story of an overprotective stepfather taking his stepdaughter on a very special vacation". And that was the point where Zibrak had me hook, line, and sinker because I too was once that child.

At once academic, lucid, hilarious, and steeped in pop culture, this look at the term "guilty pleasures", especially as it relates to the femme experience, is one of the best things I've read this year. Part of it, of course, is because I related deeply to the content and the ideas expressed here as it closely reflects concerns and thoughts that I have struggled with regarding women in literature, but I also enjoyed the felicity with which Zibrak was able to move between the personal and the political, the literary and the cultural.

Here's a book that will reward multiple rereads, in my opinion.

Who doesn't have a "Guilty Pleasure"? That reality TV show you secretly watch every week? Or that smutty book you love?

In this essay, Arielle Zibrak dives into the psychology and history of guilty pleasures. I liked her take on the subject as I'm an avid reader of romance books which are generally categorized as guilty pleasures. We may feel guilty about liking something that nowadays may be put into question (like a big white wedding dress); but at the end of the day, we are immersed in a society where we see that a lot. So why hide it?

I specially liked the introduction and first chapter. Though, there're a lot of quotes and extracts from books; in some cases, I found them to be too long. The author could have made her point without adding two pages of another book transcribed.

Somewhat more academic than I expected, with a deep dive into pop culture moments, films, books, and TV. I was most interested in the chapter on romance novels, though so much of it centred around older romances rather than current ones, which are still often considered in the realm of guilty pleasures. (I fundamentally disagreed with her conclusion that romance is essentially only escapism and doesn't serve other functions.) While the media used as examples in the book were fun and interesting and yes, could be called guilty pleasures, I felt that the idea of guilty pleasures itself was lost in favour of exploring other aspects of these cultural touchstones--the ideas were interesting, but off-topic.

As an English major in France, and a French pupil before that, I had experienced some American classics and found them mostly gloomy and unappealing (except for Emily Dickinson who's gloomy but whose sensitivity I could really relate to). I had never thought about the fact that she was a She and that it may have had an (unconscious) impact on my understanding and my feelings about her work.

Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures is a very interesting read, it appeared I knew so little about 19th cy American literature and that women writers had had such a big impact back then (their names have not crossed the Atlantic ocean... it would be funny to see what remains of our nowadays bestsellers in 200 years).

The second half of Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures drops a bit the literary aspect to focus on movies and, while food for thought, lost me little (because of the title "Avidly Reads...").

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an eArc in exchange of an honest review.

The book for all lovers of good romcoms, “chick lit,” and any fictional story dazzled with beautiful dresses and happy endings. These phrases are never associated of being worthy intellectual pursuits, instead they are seen as trashy and guilty reads targeted for a female population. Zibrak’s book is the antidote to all this madness — she uses academic theory and a personal interest in the genre to help explain why we have been wrong to categorize “female-led” stories to be less than other forms of literature. Zibrak also notes that 74% of American general-diction readers are women, and the cultural historian Helen Taylor’s research found that women are the gatekeepers to libraries, book club, literary bloggers, audiences at literary festivals and our beloved bookstagram/booktok. A tangent that interests me is why is bookstagram mostly female-oriented and how does that impact the literature that is circulated within this community?

Anyway back to the book — Zibrak’s argument is that women enjoy “guilty” reads and watches as a form of catharsis from the inequities and domination women experience in their day to day. Even the staunchest feminist can enjoy a story where the prince sweeps the heroine off her feet, but why would we ever indulge in this if we know how to stand on our own two feet? Because sometime you just want to give in and stop trying to fix the inequities you face everyday, and simply escape in a story that seeps with an accepted form of male domination. As Zibrak says, ‘while we may wish for [social and political structures] to change, fight for them to change, they do not change; so another part of why the romance is cathartic and pleasurable is because the romance doesn’t attempt to change things in a durable way.”

- This review is made possible after receiving an ARC from NetGalley. All opinions are my own.-

My feelings about so-called "guilty pleasures" are, I think, uncomplicated. Most of the time, the reason people feel guilty for liking the things that they like is because it's not considered cool to like those things. I don't have any time for that kind of guilt, and I think there's nothing more boring than worrying about what's considered cool and what isn't. But there's another kind of guilty pleasure: When you watch or read something that you know is actually bad for you, or bad for society as a whole. TV shows that perpetuate tired stereotypes, for example, or tabloid magazines that result in the actors and musicians we claim to admire being stalked by paparazzi 24/7. I can get as sucked in by these things as anyone, but I know I'll feel crappy afterward, so I tend to avoid them. Pretty simple distinction.

Arielle Zibrak feels differently. A good example may be one she cites: those columns in women's/teen girl's magazines where readers can write in to talk about their most humiliating experiences, often having to do with period mishaps and/or embarrassing themselves in front of their "crush." (Zibrak sees these columns as emblematic of the 1990s, but they've been around much longer than that.) I've always tended to think these columns were mildly harmful—basically teaching young women and girls that they're <i>supposed</i> to feel humiliated about normal human mishaps. Zibrak sees it differently. In her view, we're already well aware of all of these ways we can be humiliated in an unforgiving culture, and reading about other women/girls living through things we fear can be cathartic. Helpful, in other words, instead of harmful.

For me, this is a new way of looking at guilty pleasures, and between that and Zibrak's lively, smart writing, I was looking forward to a good reading experience. The first chapter, about romance novels (specifically those with dominant males), fit well with Zibrak's thesis: Given all the conflicting messages U.S. culture tends to give women about our sexuality, it—again—can be cathartic to see some of these conflicts play out within the confines of a story and come to some sort of resolution. With romance novels, Zibrak points out, the guilt can actually be <i>part of</i> the pleasure. This made perfect sense to me.

After that, unfortunately, things started to go downhill. The next chapter was about the guilty pleasure of "rich white people fictions"—i.e., movies where the (white) characters are clearly obscenely wealthy but it's just kind of treated as normal. The analysis of race and class issues in these films was interesting, but Zibrak's ultimate conclusions about why we enjoy these films as "guilty pleasures" were unconvincing. Ditto the next (and final chapter), about wedding movies, where Zibrak focuses a lot of her analysis on <i>Romy and Michele's High School Reunion</i>, which, uh, isn't a wedding movie.

I had other concerns. Zibrak has a strange focus on mostly older material. Why does the romance novel chapter focus on sentimental literature from the 19th century and romance novels from the 1970s instead of, say, <i>Fifty Shades of Grey</i>? Why does the section on rich white people fictions focus on <i>Father of the Bride</i>, of all things? I think this entire study would have been so much more relevant if it had centered on "guilty pleasures" of this particular moment. As it was, I had a strong feeling that most of this book was made up of recycled grad-school papers Zibrak had written years earlier.

My larger concern, though, was with the way Zibrak categorizes the guilty pleasures she discusses—romance novels, movies about rich whites, wedding movies and shows—as "femme." I no longer understand what "femme" even means these days (feel free to clue me in in the comments, but be nice—I did google it and didn't find anything useful), but deciding certain guilty pleasures are "femme" was too essentialist for my tastes. So if it's "femme" to like romance novels, what's it called if I, a cis female, prefer classics instead? Is that "butch"? Masculine? Or what? I find that whole thing exhausting. When can we just get rid of all that stuff and just be who we are? Soon, I hope!

Near the end of this short book, Zibrak refers to the way we process guilty pleasures as "deep-love/surface-hate." For some guilty pleasures, I wonder if the way we truly feel is precisely the opposite: "deep-hate/surface-love." This is the conflict I would have liked to see this book explore. I suppose I can't fault the book for not being exactly what I wanted, but what I got instead was a disappointment either way.

I received this advance review copy via NetGalley. Thank you to the publisher.

This was a delightful read about an often frustrating subject. For long I've disliked the expression "guilty pleasure" as a way to judge what kind of entertainment is credible or not - after all, who's to judge?! - and Arielle not only elaborates on the issue (much more eloquently than I ever could), but she does it showing how detrimental the use of the expression is in other areas as well as helping perpetuate values of misogyny, racism and sexism.

Deeming something a "guilty pleasure" is the patriarchy's way of diminishing, invalidating and removing credibility of women's stories, women's lives and works and Arielle not only proves it but she does it with wonderful humour and sarcasm.

Loved it!

I've long believed the term guilty pleasure is a misnomer because women shouldn't feel guilt about pleasure, but this book offers an interesting examination of why so many do. I also loved it because the author says so much of what I've been saying about the romance genre forever, but with a more academic cultural analysis and detailed historical context--and yet without digressing too much into the extraneous the way a longer book might have.

Good cultural critique of romance novels (and other "guilty pleasure" media) and their relationship with female shame. I'm not sure I was fully convinced by some of the author's conclusions, but it was nevertheless a thought-provoking read and just made my to-read list a good bit longer.

A great discussion about romance novels. I wish that more people would read this book and understand the cultural significance of romance novels. A great discussion of heteropatriarchy and how it affects something as simple as romance novels. Terrific analysis and wonderful cultural discussion.