Guilty reading pleasures

I’m quite happy to openly read a wide variety of books and feel no shame whatever in devouring ‘genre fiction’, my two main genres being crime and thrillers and mum lit. I’ll also read contemporary fiction, though usually the page-turning Richard and Judy recommendations, with the odd Booker nominee or even winner thrown int. And there are a bunch of classics that I re-read again and again – Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice…

But there are some books that, while I bury myself in them, I feel somewhat wrong or sordid in doing so. (No, it’s not porn, sorry!) Thirty years ago that was Mills & Boon, twenty years ago it was Jilly Cooper and these days it’s Catherine Alliott.

I first discovered Catherine Alliott shortly after RoRo was born, when I developed a rather bizarre inability to read anything that didn’t involve children in some way – and mum lit was really in its infancy in those days. I went through the baby ones, like Polly Williams’ The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy first of all, then had to move on to the ones with school-age children.

Catherine Alliott’s characters are fairly well-rounded and her plots fun and absorbing. Why should this make me feel guilty, you’re wondering? When I’m quite happy to read mum lit of various kinds? Because I read it in a rather voyeuristic way – in a similar way to how I read Jilly Cooper in my younger years (the appeal of the sex aside) – soaking up the large town-houses or rambling country farmhouses or mansions. Placing myself in the ensuite bathrooms applying expensive make-up and picking from shoes and bags in my walk-in closet. That kind of voyeurism.

But that’s not too unusual. Dreaming about a bigger house or a better job (or something at present unattainable, though not completely without the realms of possibility) is fairly common and expected in most humans. I particularly enjoyed my most recent read, The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton, as it was set in my old stomping ground, Oxford. The main character lived in one of the big townhouses in Jericho that I spent many years coveting. Her best friend lived in a big farmhouse in a nearby country village.

No, it’s not the dreaming that gets to me. What makes me feel guilty is the political affiliations of the majority of the characters. Most of the children go to fee-paying schools (often even boarding school – though many of the mothers end up rebelling against the boarding school traditions of theirs and their partners’ families because they can’t bear not seeing their children) and those who don’t, are sent to state schools out of necessity, rather than with happiness. Many of them have family pews in the village church. They clearly all vote Conservative and, for goodness sake, they read the Daily Mail!

Yet, I somehow still enjoy reading them and hope to see A Rural Affair back on the library Fastback shelf again soon, so I can spend a couple of days buried in that particular upper middle class world. (Though, perhaps I’ll be wrong and it will be set among Guardian-reading, comprehensive school alumni – you know, my kind of world.)

Do you have a guilty reading pleasure? Does it bother you to read about characters who don’t share your political or other beliefs?