I’ve talked about television, movies, and music. Now, let’s look at books and guilty pleasures.

Probably my main guilty pleasure when it comes to books is westerns. I. Love. Westerns! In my younger years, I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books too many times to count. (Although for some reason, Alonzo’s book was always my favorite).

I also discovered the Wagons West series by Dana Fuller Ross at my library. These books are part historical fiction, part action, and part soap opera about the settling of the American West. Most of the titles are state names, like Oregon, Oklahoma, Tennessee, etc. There’s something like 24 books in this series, and I read them all — again and again and again. In order. Ross also wrote a couple of spin-off series, but I never read those. Maybe I will now …

And I used to read historical romances set in the American West like crazy. I’d go to the library and get as many as I could find. Cowboys! Cattle rustlers! Epic love stories! Sigh …

Then, there’s fantasy. Another love of mine (as if you couldn’t guess). I’ll read just about any fantasy book if there’s a) magic, b) swords, or c) dwarves it in. When I discovered fantasy, I started with folks like Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and David Eddings. Now, most of my TBR pile is fantasy, paranormal romance, or some combination of the two. I’m especially digging the surge of urban fantasy books and folks like Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison.

I don’t really care for sci-fi, though. I know it’s really just a different kind of fantasy, but spaceships and aliens have never appealed to me. I’ve read some of the Star Wars sci-fi books, but that’s about it.

I also like cozy murder mysteries. You know the kind I’m talking about. The ones that take place in a quaint, charming small town that just happens to have the highest murder rate in America — where the same person stumbles over a dead body every other week or so. M.C. Beaton writes a couple of murder mystery series set in England, and I’ve read most of those books, along with all the old Agatha Christies.

Then, there are folks like Robert B. Parker, who writes the Spenser private investigator series, among others. I’ve read every single one of those, even though the characters don’t really change or grow that much and it’s really easy to figure out who the bad guy is (Spenser almost always knows by chapter 10). But the books have great dialogue and one-liners. So whenever there’s a new one, I always get it from the library.

What about you? What are some of your bookish guilty pleasures?