Best Books of 2014: Guilty Pleasures!

Laying out the ground rules for a new category like “Best Guilty Pleasures” almost necessitates defining such a thing as “guilty pleasures” just in general, I realize, and that’s always trickier than it seems, especially if you’re trying to avoid a lazy fall-back like Justice Potter Stewart’s offhand definition of pornography, I know it when I see it. Certainly there are two qualities of a guilty pleasure that are clear: a) they are cheeseball-easy in their conception – The History of the Penis! The Year I Spent in My Kid’s Treehouse! My Pet Pig Can Dance! – the kind of book-pitch that, as we used to say, practically writes itself. And b) their execution itself is designed for easy slurping-down; there’s scarcely a book on this list that couldn’t have been transformed into a serious, non-guilty pleasure with a little deeper digging or more complicated revision. The authors of these books chose instead to write these versions – to amuse (especially, of course, the actual pieces of comedy on the list) quickly rather than to challenge seriously. There’s nothing wrong with that (unless you’re Jennifer Weiner and want to poop out a pop-culture smoothie and nevertheless have it treated like it was the latest Marilynne Robinson novel; such people are funny), nor is there anything wrong with having the odd hour beguiled by what amounts to good clean literary fun. 2014 had less of that kind of fun than most years, but here are the best examples:

10. The Clone Apocalypse by Steven L. Kent (Ace) – This tenth (and – say it ain’t so! – last) of Kent’s frantically readable gunning-and-running saga of a 26th-Century killing-machine clone with a heart of gold is one of the best of the whole wonderfully disreputable series: someone had designed a virus specifically to kill clones, and the only man who’s immune is the only man for the job of stopping it: Wayson Harris, our hero, portrayed on the cover, as always, by our old friend Paul Marron. Kent claims this is the final installment in his Clone saga, but the book ends with the door wide open to more books. Here’s hoping we see them.

9. Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation by Jan Morris (Liveright) – In this lovely tossed-off keepsake volume, Morris accompanies dozens of beautiful reproductions of the artwork of Renaissance Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio with delightful essays – sometimes about the paintings, sometimes about the things in the paintings, sometimes about whatever Morris feels like addressing (there’s a little poofy-dog on the cover, for instance). Morris is a fantastic writer who could make virtually any topic interesting, and Carpaccio is a great subject – this isn’t an artistic monograph by any stretch but rather the engrossing dinner-conversation of a great lover of Venice.

8. The Martian by Andy Weir (Crown) – Weir’s novel (destined, I think, to become a classic of science fiction) focuses on a killer premise: Mark Watney, an ordinary-guy engineer, is accidentally separated from his mission teammates and stranded on Mars and must survive using only his wits, his engineering knowledge, and the contents of the mission’s habitat. Thanks to Weir’s infectiously jaunty prose style, the series of Mark’s adventures is utterly gripping. You can read my full review here

7. Another Great Day at Sea by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon Books) – Dyer’s braying dilettantism has annoyed me enough in the past to earn him a spot on the bad lists, but the best elements of that dilettanisim – the curiosity and the appetite for adventure – can work wonders too, as is the case in this enormously entertaining account of life and duty aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H. W. Bush. Dyer spends a good deal of time deep inside the workings of this floating city, and his descriptions of the pressures and psychologies on board are riveting.

6. The Kills: Sutler, The Massive, The Kill, and The Hit by Richard House (Picador) – This grand four-volumes-in-one stylistic update of John LeCarre, this sprawling set of thrillers in which desperate and culpable men fight their way out of the tangles of the Iraq War, is so beautifully written that you can go 50, 100, even 150 pages so enraptured that you fail to notice what bubbling, frothing nonsense it is. It’s slightly easier to spot it if you pick a couple of pages at random, where you’ll almost inevitably interrupt an exchange like, “Understand me, Myers: those protocols are dead, and if you hold onto them, you’ll be dead too. Now I’ll ask you again: what is the decryption sequence?” “Oh, I understand you perfectly, Utrecht, but these protocols are my lifeline, and that’s not negotiable.” The more I think about The Kills, the more I think all this rhetorical empty posturing and tail-chasing might be entirely intentional, a Grand Guignol commentary on the insantiy of the Iraq War itself. It could very well be – The Kills strikes me as one of the books most likely to shift position in my estimation over time – but for now, what enormous mindless fun.

5. Prince Lestat by Anne Rice (Knopf Doubleday) – In terms of guilty pleasures, Rice’s Vampire Chronicles have been front and center for longer than most of these other authors have been alive. And in this latest confection, she returns to her best character, strutting, dynamic super-vampire Lestat, who sets himself to uncover the evil behind a rash of vampire-killings going on throughout the world. The book isn’t for beginners to the continuity: Rice fills it with countless allusions to her many previous novels. But fans of the Vampire Chronicles – in their millions – will simply love it.

4. My Pet Book by Bob Staake (Random House) – Of course children’s picture books are almost by definition guilty pleasures for any reading adult, although I’ve certainly derived intense amounts of pleasure out of them over the years, and I likewise smiled from ear to ear while paging through Staake’s tale of a little boy in Smartytown who’s decided that he doesn’t want a dog or a cat as his pet but rather a book, which he proceeds to take with him everywhere. No book-lover should be without this little pet.

3. Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow by Dr. Jan Pol (Gotham Books) – Semi-legendary Michigan veterinarian Dr. Pol has thousands of stories about his many thousands of animal patients, some of whom have been angelic, while others have been almost as nightmarish as the average human being would be (on the book’s cover, he’s posing with a basset hound). Pol’s tall tales have been polished to perfection over the decades, and they’re infinitely fun to read.

2. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (Tor) – This second volume in Sanderson’s “Stormlight Archive” is every bit as absurdly, cataclysmically long as the first volume was, and for the same reason: Sanderson gives a hundred-page back-story to every rock and blade of grass and person and artifact on his storm-wracked world of Roshar, and the reason no editor is willing to reign him in is simple: he’s a fantastically entertaining writer – as far as I’m concerned, he can yarn-spin in these books as long as he wants. You can read my review here

1. Worst. Person. Ever by Douglas Coupland (Penguin Group) – Raymond Gunt, the main character in Coupland’s irresistible comic romp, is a scabrous, foul-mouthed jerk (you’d be one too, if an enormous homeless guy pressed your face into the sidewalk and forced you to sing “Tainted Love” from start to finish), and the book – which is basically one hilariously inappropriate joke setup after another – is a little snapshot of the sheer among of havoc he can wreak in just one misadventure. None of it has any more literary value than anything else Coupland’s ever written, but boy, is he a fiendishly entertaining writer. You can read my review here