English Literature 101 — One Angry Waitress

I am an elitist in spite of the fact that I’ve never been able to locate the salad fork. For some reason I think that reality television is somehow beneath me and on more than one occasion I’ve stopped calling men once I find out that they text with terrible grammar. Yet there is an exception to this rule: during the summer I like to read really terrible fiction.

It’s like I never got out of the habit of adhering to school reading lists and assuming that books were going to somehow enrich my mind, when really all I want to do is kick back with the sort of book that you expect to come with a half a pound of sand between its pages.

Beneath my copy of 100 Years of Solitude (which I’ve not yet managed to slog through) there is an entire chick lit series, and beneath that other miscellaneous books from other so-called must read lists. It is as if I think that sandwiching them between more worthy reads cancels them out.

During the rest of the year my guilty pleasure reads are contemporary fiction, but once June rolls around I read books that declare the characters to be, “tall, dark and fangsome.” It’s a particular point of shame for me and one for which my mother judges me, saying when I send her a copy of whatever I’m reading, “I liked it, but did there have to be so much sex?” and I have to admit that after three months of filling my brain with this sort of things I hadn’t really noticed.

I have a few girlfriends that I trade these selections with, some of which have gone out of print for reasons that it’s probably easy to see—no one else believes that the blood of synthetic werewolves kills vampires—though we few are willing to entertain the possibilities.

I’ve often thought that I should be trying harder at the second language I’ve been working on learning so then I’d have an excuse for reading the things I do. Why do I have a copy of The High-Heeled Kitchen Caper? “Because it’s in German and I’m trying to learn a language here with whatever tools I can find,” I will explain. It’s not a hundred percent believable, but to me it’s better than just admitting that I’ve been reading the series since I was sixteen.

Why I care sort of baffles me. But here I am purchasing the hard covers of my favorite novels so I can put a different dust jacket over them and pretending that anybody might actually care that I’m reading the American Idol equivalent of literature.