Booksellers reflect on their favourite ‘guilty pleasures’ in books, and whether they agree with this term at all.

My mum is a fan of the ol’ bodice ripper, but she also has a tendency to shove said bodice ripper underneath the couch to hide it whenever people come over to the house. While I find this pretty amusing, I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. I think if you enjoy something, you should just hold your head up high and read it. As such, I have a rule. If I’m not willing to openly read it on public transport, then I’m not allowed to read it! – Isobel Moore, children’s bookseller at St Kilda

When Twilight first hit the shelves I was working in children’s publishing. I remember seeing stacks of the book (with its original cover, which featured an open-mouthed Bratz doll figure lingering near some school lockers) in every bookshop I visited and thinking to myself ‘the sales rep must have loved this’. Unknown author, dreadful cover, and ‘vampire romance’ was a genre totally foreign to the YA market at that time. The only way the book could have possibly made its way onto shelves in this kind of quantity was if the sales rep presenting it had been gushing like a fire hydrant.

So, I bought a copy for myself out of curiosity and… I finished it in one day. I then turned back to page one and started reading it for a second time. The whole time there was an annoying little voice in my head saying, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, this is the trashiest thing you’ve read in a loooooong time’. But thankfully this voice was mostly drowned out by some other voice that was going, ‘Wooohooo!’

Afterwards, I couldn’t explain why something with so few redeeming literary qualities had been so enjoyable. I’ll admit that I still don’t have the answer, but I was reassured when the series became a phenomenon. At least I had company. – Lian Hingee, digital marketing manager

I moved house eight months ago, so of course I’ve only just started unpacking now. In the process of slowly alphabetising my book collection, I can’t help but cringe when I come across the taste of my teenage self. In particular, one shelf of fluorescent spines stands out – when I was thirteen I bought (and devoured) everything Nick Earls had ever written. Earls is incredibly funny, completely unpretentious, and made me fall in love with Brisbane a decade before I set foot there. I was 13 when I read his YA bestseller, 48 Shades of Brown, and found it such a delight that I followed it up with Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses, Perfect Skin and World of Chickens. So it was that in my first days of high school I became obsessed with these sex comedies about men in their twenties and thirties, stumbling through life and love. Thanks for educating me on male insecurities, Nick Earls. My obsession with you was definitely an intense and embarrassing one, but those fluorescent spines are still hanging out at eye-level on my bookshelf and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. – Stella Charls, marketing and event coordinator

I am fundamentally against the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ in books, because a) I don’t believe in book shaming, and b) it’s a term often used as a way to disparage books written primarily by women for women, such as romance or erotica. Sometimes YA books, genre books or anything with a supernatural creature on the cover also falls into this category.

Several years ago, I was on a multi-day hike in New Zealand, and I was reading a fantasy YA book in a communal cabin area. A posh Englishman sat down next to me and pulled out a copy of Treasure Island. He sniffed at my book’s cover, and later made a point of telling my friend that he only reads classics. Yuck. I immediately hated him, of course. But I did feel a momentary sense of embarrassment about my book: should I be reading this? Is it okay to be reading this? Will the other people on this hike fully appreciate what a cultured, well-read person I actually am? Oh God, I need to read more classics by dead white men!

But then I took a deep breath and got over it. It hadn’t occurred to me to be embarrassed by my book until that moment, and certainly there was no reason to be. If anything, I was annoyed that someone else’s fleeting judgement suddenly made me feel like I was reading the wrong sort of book.

And this is the danger in using the term ‘guilty pleasure’. If we don’t read these so-called ‘guilty pleasures’, and read them openly and proudly, we might just end up reading the same old thing over and over again. – Nina Kenwood, marketing manager

Describing a book as a ‘guilty pleasure’ hooks me immediately. To me, the descriptor says: this book is going to be majorly addictive and a heck of a lot of fun. It also implies that the plot is likely to be somewhat formulaic, which I can find comforting when I’m in the mood for it – this is likely why I’m a fan of rereading as well. I reread the Harry Potter series every few years because of the sheer enjoyment value: I anticipate the next turn in the story with pleasure, feeling both nostalgic yet surprised at what new elements jump out at me.

My sister also loves romance books and she gifted me Julia Quinn who is sharp and funny. I particularly love her regency series about the Bridgerton family. However you feel about the term of ‘guilty pleasure’, I guarantee these reads are both majorly addictive and a heck of a lot of fun. – Bronte Coates, digital content coordinator

The Da Vinci Code hit in 2003, and as an impressionable 15-year-old, I was certainly not immune to its appeal. In fact, I devoured this novel and its predecessor Angels and Demons, so swept up in the breakneck plot that I didn’t really notice anything about the writing itself. While I didn’t bother with the later sequels and nowadays get a chuckle out of how many copies of The Da Vinci Code appear on the shelves of second-hand bookshops, the memory of wolfing down my lunch so I could hurry back to my reading – my heart pounding in my chest – is a good one. – Alan Vaarwerk, editorial assistant for Readings Monthly