Mmmm...Mac and Cheese

Once, in a North Carolina used bookstore, I bought The Satanic Verses purely for the shock value. And while I read it, I carried it around and made sure that everyone could see the title. Later on, my brother read it and I’m pretty sure it was for the exact same reason.

Of course, it turned out to be a really good book. A salad book. Both tasty and nutritious.

[Other salad books: Pride and Prejudice, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The House of the Spirits, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, Jane Eyre, Hamlet]

Some books are cough syrup. Moby Dick. Anna Karenina. These are books that are so good for you that you have to force them down. Of course, you can see their value. You love to discuss them. But they’re not the sort of books you just curl up with. (I mean, without falling asleep next to them. Not that it’s happened to me.)

[Other cough syrup: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Daniel Deronda, Tender Buttons, Possession, A Farewell to Arms, King Lear]

The kind of book you curl up with on a rainy day, or read with improbable attention on the subway, or stay up all night to finish is mac and cheese. It’s no salad, but it fills your stomach with the warm fullness of comfort food. It’s Anne of Green Gables. If you’re Sam, it’s Gone with the Wind.

[Other mac and cheese: Wuthering Heights, Pinocchio, The God of Small Things, Rebecca, Othello]

Then there's dessert. Dessert books are the kind of thing you read to reward yourself for choking down a little cough syrup. Genre books like fantasy or mystery. Funny essays. America: the Book. Fairy tales.

[Other desserts: Naked, Men at Arms, Naked Pictures of Famous People, The Eye of the World, Final Exam, Twelfth Night]

And then there are Cheetos. The books you won’t read anywhere but your bedroom because you can’t believe you actually read them and you definitely don’t want anyone else to know. I once saw a woman on the subway, old enough to be my grandmother, reading a Harlequin romance novel, The Australian’s Love Child or some such, and I marveled at her guts, to read a Cheeto out in public. They’re Cheetos because there’s no nutrition involved. You kind of crave it at first, rush in with guilty pleasure. About halfway through, however, you wake up a little and feel kind of sick.

[Other cheetos: Jared's Love Child, Cosmo magazine, Desperation, City of (a novelization of the TV show Angel), The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet]

I guess I’ve always marveled at people who can stick to a diet. People who read cough syrup like it’s mac and cheese. I am forever expending my days in starchy comfort or rich desserts with the occasional cob salad or cough syrup thrown in when I feel ambitious. (I’m not even going to mention the Cheetos Sam has force-fed me. Pregnancy-genre romance novels indeed! [Force-fed? You begged me!--Sam])

But rationalization is two thirds of being human. So, I like to think I’m an omnivorous reader, a champion of culture in all its tastier forms.