Season 3, Episode 1: All You Can Read Buffet

Opening Season 3 of the podcast, co-hosts Sara Dixon and Daniel Pewewardy talk with Arielle Zibrak, Associate Professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Wyoming to discuss the topic of Category 4: Guilty Pleasures. Zibrak, who is also author of the book Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures, discusses the concept of shame and media consumption and why we should never feel bad about the things we love.

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcription. Some errors may occur. If you find a transcription error, please contact us with any corrections and we will make those corrections as quickly as possible.

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SARA, VOICEOVER: Hi, welcome to season three of Read. Return. Repeat. I'm Sara Dixon. Daniel and I are back as your hosts for what we hope is a fun, informative way to explore the ReadICT Reading Challenge categories. Daniel, do you want to say hi to our listeners?

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: Of course. Thank you, Sara. It's good to be back. We have an exciting year planned for this season. In today's episode, called "All You Can Read Buffet," we're going to explore category 4: a guilty pleasure read.

SARA, VOICEOVER: Guilty pleasures have been a concept since almost the beginning of the novel. There's always this dichotomy of great -- capital G -- literature and everything else is just kind of silly and a waste of time.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: It might be genre fiction, romance and bro lit, young adult novels, comic books, anything that isn't widely accepted as great literature. But why do we have to feel guilty about it? Who gets to say what constitutes great literature?

SARA, VOICEOVER: We hope to get into that today with our guest, Arielle Zibrak. Arielle is a writer, researcher, editor, and educator living in the Rocky Mountain West. Before earning a PhD in American literature from Boston University, she worked in publishing.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: Arielle is now an associate professor at the University of Wyoming in literature and gender and women's studies. She writes about literature, gender, sexuality in popular culture, and she is the author of Avidly Reads: Guilty Pleasures. She is currently at work on three more books. Let's welcome Arielle.

SARA: Hi, thank you so much for joining us, Arielle.

ARIELLE ZIBRAK: Thank you for having me.

DANIEL: It's awesome to meet you. Thank you so much.

ARIELLE: It's really nice to meet both of you. And I'm looking forward to chatting with you and hopefully getting to know your library patrons through the internet.

DANIEL: Awesome. Yeah, we're really excited to have you today. Tell our listeners about your journey. How did you find yourself writing a book about guilty pleasures?

ARIELLE: So it's a funny story. I'm -- you know, as you know, I'm an English professor. And I'm used to writing more traditional scholarship works about literature from the 19th century. My training is as a scholar of 19th century American literature. And I've been doing that for a while, but I sort of had this little bit of a sideline, starting in grad school where I would make jokes with my friends about the things that we were reading. And I would, would sort of mess around with them and be like, well, who would be interested in humor pieces about like 18th century women's fiction or about classical art. And then the website The Toast was born. I don't know if you remember that website. But it was like a feminist humor site that sadly no longer exists. But it was a lot about classic literature. So I published a few things there. And then I kind of got a taste for more public-facing writing. And I have, I've had this kind of like sideline as a more journalistic, essayistic part of my career for a while now. And I have been writing for a website on the LA Review of Books site called Avidly that is this kind of work, like more public facing literary criticism. And I wrote a piece for them about what was at the time the most popular movie on Netflix. I think it was actually the most popular movie that Netflix had ever had. And it was called The Kissing Booth. I don't know, did either of you watch it?

SARA: I did. I watched it. Yeah, I did.

DANIEL: I have not.

ARIELLE: Do you like it, Sara? Tell me what you think about The Kissing Booth.

SARA: Well, I mean, so I'm a sucker for like teenage drama because I don't know, maybe I don't have enough angst in my life. But like -- that's not true. I have plenty of angst in my life. But, you know, maybe the simpler days of being a teenager when you don't have all of the stresses of everyday life. Anyway, actually, one of my guilty pleasures is reading Y.A. fiction. So it follows that I would like teen romance Netflix movies.

ARIELLE: So I wrote this thing about The Kissing Booth because I was interested in why it was so popular, especially in the moment that it was so popular, but just sort of just following the real like heft of the me too movement. And the reason why I thought that was relevant is like there's a sort of classic dynamic going on in that movie where the guy love interest is kind of like a rage monster. Like he loses his temper all the time, he's very controlling. And she like, she's into it. The best example I think is – I can see you, Sara, being like, I don't remember that part. But there's like a part where he like slightly... like he hits the car. He like bangs his hand on the hood of the car, and he's like, "Get in the car." And she gets in the car, which when I was watching it, I was like, wow, I don't think you see that too much these days. But I think that there was like a relationship there, which is that I wanted to account for why, although, you know, of course, women do not want to be exploited or treated violently or manipulated or all of the horrible things that they endure, that still has a kind of... that kind of dynamic or behavior has like a shadow in the fantasy life of media that is aimed at women, or as I talk about in my book, I don't really like to say women for this, these kinds of like genre concerns, because I think it's... this media is really, for anyone who would self-identify as femme and just like, has a sort of femme sensibility about it.

And the way that I define a femme sensibility is when the subject of the media is more about someone else, not the main character. When the main character is, like, fixated on somebody else. So usually it's love stories. So I wrote this piece and the editors of Avidly who do the series also for NYU Press that my in which my book appears asked me if I would consider writing like a bigger thing about this issue. Why is it that so many articles of femme media have this element of sort of like unsavory politics I guess, is one way of thinking about it. Like, they're, they can be very white, they can be very invested in gender power dynamics, like what do we do with this kind of media? So I started thinking about it from that angle. And then I really started to interrogate the concept of guilty pleasure because I don't believe in it. Like, it's what I would tell people what I was writing about, they'd be like, "Oh, you're writing about basically like guilty pleasures, you know, your... your guilty pleasures," which is like reality TV. You know, romantic comedies, soap operas, romance novels. And I started to realize that the concept of guilty pleasures is really almost like aimed at this femme audience, like things that we identify as guilty pleasures are oftentimes the things that we associate with femme media.

SARA: So for the purposes of this conversation, what would you call -- I'm still gonna say it, guilty pleasures, because that's what we call our category. But what are the things that you would qualify as a guilty pleasure? Even though we do not, we do not guilt people here. There's no shame in what you enjoy.

ARIELLE: I mean, I think... so the way that I define a guilty pleasure in the book is really different than the standard definition of guilty pleasures, although it's kind of tricky. You're right, because I also do write about the things that people say are guilty pleasures. But my definition of guilty pleasures is media that gives us pleasure because it stimulates guilt we already have.

SARA: Oh.

ARIELLE: And so what I mean by that is like, I think that to be a femme person in America -- specifically the United States of America, I would say -- I mean, I do think this is true in other cultures, but I'm, I'm a scholar of American literature and really thinking about the American context. But to be a femme person in America is to experience your pleasure as guilt, to experience your body as guilt, to experience your desires as guilt. So like, one of my favorite books when I was little, which is having a resurgence, they're updating it, I think they're making a movie version of it is Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, which I think is a really good example of something that is a pleasurable read that is all about shame and guilt. It's sort of like this young female character coming into her adult female body and trying to reconcile sort of what's happening in her body with her uncertain position and relationship to spirituality. So you, you go with the character as she experiences all the kinds of excruciating shame and guilt that I think that a lot of people who grew up self-identifying as femme in this country know really well. So like, another form of media that I talked about in the book is when I was a teenager, there were all of these columns in popular magazines for teenage girls that were about like the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you. So there would be like –

SARA: Oh yeah, I remember that.

ARIELLE: Why me? And why am.

SARA: I was more of a like... I don't even remember. But I remember these columns, where they were like, tell us your most embarrassing moment. They were usually like, period related or, you know, I liked a boy and I fell on my face kind of things.

ARIELLE: Right, exactly. And so I think that there's like a pleasure that femme subjects take in sort of rehearsing their shame and guilt for each other. And that there's a real... you know, there are two schools of thought about this. Some media critics or cultural critics feel like these are disciplinary documents. And what I mean by that is like, they teach us to be ashamed, so that you're not going to be ashamed that people know you have your period when you're like a 17 year old young woman, unless some magazine tells you that's a shameful thing.

But I kind of feel the other way where I think that's in the culture and people feel that way already. And there's a catharsis reading about other people experiencing that shame. And I think that like making that a public forum where you don't feel alone in your shame has a real social benefit. And so I'm interested in... so there's two ways of thinking about like the kinds of guilty pleasures that interests me. So I'm interested really in almost anything that is about guilt or like, depicts feelings of guilt or shame in really sympathetic ways. So, in that sense, one of my favorite guilty pleasure books is Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Because I think it's one of the best like novelistic depictions of feeling really guilty and ashamed of yourself in all of literature. In another sense, one of my favorite guilty pleasure fictions is The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory, which is a romance novel that came out recently that's a joy to read. And a lot of it is about like feeling insecurity about your body, but still going after your desire for pleasure or intimate encounters because you deserve that. And you can experience shame and still access pleasure or love, like, alongside that shame. I think that part of what this media does for us is show us that it doesn't have to be an obstacle to those things.

SARA: Can you give us a little bit more about this, like literary gatekeeping, as it were, and who decides what makes it high-brow, what makes it low-brow?

ARIELLE: I wish I could tell you that there was like one person in a castle full of books.

SARA: There's one person.

ARIELLE: This one. Not this one.

But you know, like anything, it's a really... it's a confluence of a lot of institutions and cultural forces. But it's interesting to think about. So I kind of am that man in the high tower in some ways. I'm a tenured professor of literature at a state institution, you know, so I'm very conscious of that. And the discipline that I'm a part of, like the discipline of teaching English at colleges and universities in the United States has, in large part, shaped the way that Americans see literature. So, you know, originally, when universities were first founded, you wouldn't read a novel in a university class. You would read the classics, you would eventually read Shakespeare. It wasn't until really the middle of the 20th century that you would even read Charles Dickens, who was thought of as like a schlocky popular author, not taken seriously by critics. And so different individual figures sort of each their way into a classical literature curriculum. And how those figures were determined, was largely by also a small select group of literary critics who determined, you know, with this, like, great books mentality, these are the things that college students should read, and an idea of what a curriculum is. So we're still sort of living with that ghost. Because we do have to have our curriculum. You know, you can't be an English major and there are no required classes, there's no syllabus, there's no reading lists. Like we have to make a decision at some point, what do we teach students? I think we're still kind of recovering from these various cultural institutions that have told us a certain thing is more important for people to learn than another thing. But it's a tricky problem because we can't... I would never want to sort of jettison the idea of a curriculum altogether. And I do think there's value in students reading Shakespeare and students reading John Donne, but I also think there's value in students taking classes in all sorts of things. And I don't view that in a kind of hierarchical way.

SARA: Yeah, I was kind of going in that vein. While you were talking, I was thinking, you know, because I'm an English major. And I remember very distinctly having the Shakespeare class, having the American literature class, having the... you know, all the greats. And then now, I'm a librarian, and I'm like, well, why shouldn't we be reading Twilight? You know, like, why can't we read things that we enjoy? And yes, I work mostly with adults, but in youth services, I know that we strive to teach kids like, you know, you should be enjoying what you read. It doesn't always have to be this productive. You're learning something as you do it. And so kind of that journey that I've been on, from what is considered the only kind of good literature to, well, let's consume, let's have a colorful plate of media.

DANIEL: Yeah, and I think I was very lucky to have like, kind of out-there professors in my English program. I took a class on autobiographies and we were reading like a lot of things from like, various like postmodern authors. And also like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie's biographies. And just like those kinds of like texts being included because those are popular texts that like, people are like reading and things. Like I feel like with those being in the curriculum, as a young like college student, like that affected how I view media and how I don't judge people based off their media and things and like going into public service, I still think about those classes I took and the professor's takes. I think yeah, it is important, like, how weirdly gatekeeping the curriculum's become in regards to like, what's high-brow and low-brow.

SARA: But as librarians, I think that we are probably striving to get away from those gates, right?

DANIEL: Yeah.

SARA: Break them down.

ARIELLE: Yeah. And also, I mean, I think the wonderful thing that librarians can do is sort of hasten a process that happens for most serious readers -- and by serious, I just mean like people who read a lot -- is that a lot of times, you know, I'll meet other English professors who became specialists in their area through more popular or like more contemporary literature. So like, medievalist who fell in love with Lord of the Rings, or, you know, Jane Austen scholars who fell in love with like, romance novels that were set in that period. So I think that like a lot of times, people just start to read something like a genre that they really love. And then that branches out into other kinds of interests, like, oh, maybe you want to read about, you know, a novel that was actually written during that time period. Or maybe you want to read a book about the history of that time period. Like, there are ways that we can move into different kinds of genres from the things we love and retain that kind of spirit of avidity about consuming those things, as opposed to like, I should be reading Jane Austen because everybody says that she's a really great writer.

Well, like in this concept of there's two kinds of ways of thinking about guilty pleasures, I mean, the other thing, I said that something that gets associated with guilty pleasures is like the feminine, right? But the other thing that we've been kind of skirting around is the popular, which is a really bizarre one where it's like, if something is popular, I mean, this is always the way snobbery works, right? It's like a version of the kid at school who says, like, I liked that band before anybody knew about them, and they're way cooler than the person who bought the shirt at the concert once they were huge.

DANIEL: Yeah.

SARA: I was never that kid, never that kid. I was never that kid. I was like, the one that liked them 10 years later. I was like, did you guys hear about this band?

ARIELLE: There's this long history of tending to reject the popular. So one of the things that I talked about in my book that's a pretty well known incident in American literature is this really famous compliment that Nathaniel Hawthorne made to his editor in a letter, where he wrote that he was sick of scribbling women in their trash, because at the time that he was writing that it was all the women novelists who were making money as professional writers and selling hundreds of thousands of copies when he was actually not doing that well. And so there's this funny irony that the writers that we really celebrate in my period, in 19th century American literature, like Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, who still have this prestige reputation, like, you know, it's considered like an honor, a badge of honor, if you can make your way through Moby-Dick -- which, by the way, is one of my favorite novels -- but the point that I'm trying to make here is that part of the reason why we don't teach those women writers as much is because they were so famous. And so we, like value the writers that we do tend to teach in a canonical way because they weren't that famous. It was like they were... a high, you hear a lot of times, like the highest praise, you could say about a novelist was they were ahead of their time, which is why they couldn't be appreciated by the people in their time. And so while I do agree that those writers are great and I love their work, I also think that we learn a lot more about the people of the time period by reading the things that they really loved to read. And not like everybody was reading and talking about, which is not something that we often do in the 19th century literature classroom. Like, do you want to take a guess who was the best selling writer in America in the 19th century? Like who would you think it might be?

DANIEL: Oh, man.

SARA: In America?

DANIEL: 19th century?

SARA: I would guess it's a political writer.

DANIEL: I want to say Mark Twain, but I feel like it's someone even like, broader than that.

ARIELLE: Very good guess.

SARA: I was gonna be like, somebody who was writing pamphlets. I don't know. I have no idea. Awful at history.

ARIELLE: It's this woman named E. D. E. N. Southworth. And I'm not surprised if you've never heard of her. It's kind of a mean question. But yeah, Mark Twain was a pretty good guess.

SARA: I'll keep it for Jeopardy.

ARIELLE: We don't, we don't hardly ever read her work, which is totally great. It's like adventure stories and intrigue and mystery and robbers dens and sword fights and all sorts of fun stuff. Women like being stolen away in the night and missing babies switched identities, kind of like Princess Bride like adventure genre. And she was this incredibly well known, famous author during her time period. So she sold many books that I often find first editions of her books just in thrift shops around because there are so many of them. Like there are just so many copies of her books exist. And people don't value them because she's not someone who's often taught. But if you were like, dropped into the middle of the 19th century, and you said, "Do you know who Herman Melville is?" to a random person, they would probably say no. But if you said, "Do you know who Eden Southworth is?" they would, of course, know who she was. And so I think it's interesting that we tend to, like, disregard these popular authors. And I think part of it is the... is the misogyny of the like, whole prestige culture. But I think part of it is also like, by virtue of the fact that something is popular. Like you mentioned Twilight. I think part of the reason why people are ashamed to read Twilight is not just that it's like teenage vampires falling in love with each other, but also that it's, it's like something everyone is reading. And there's this kind of literary bias towards, I want to be reading something that nobody else is reading because that would make me very cool.

DANIEL: Are there's such situations like in like, the history of like, what like literature where like, there's like an eating of the other that takes place where like the gatekeepers have decided that what might be seen as low-brow has like prestige to it and so it's like Incorporated, kind of? I guess, like a good example is how, like, I was reading recently about how the Ziegfeld Follies was... how the like rich of New York City consumed vaudeville because vaudeville was like a lower class. But like, this is how Roy Rogers got his start was like, he was a vaudeville performer. And he got recruited to be in the Ziegfeld Follies, which was basically vaudeville on Broadway. And so like, I don't know, have you ever like seen that where people are like, have decided that this needs to be like on another level when it's like brought into like, those like circles?

ARIELLE: Yeah, all the time. I like your example better. But, you know, Dickens I mentioned is was one who people thought was like trashy popular novelist and then started to interpret his work seriously. And that has happened with a lot of the women writers that I mentioned. There was a huge recovery movement of these authors. In sort of like the second wave feminism of the 1970s and the '80s. A lot of feminist scholars recovered their work, started publishing new editions of it, writing scholarship about it, all of which leads to more people teaching it. So some of those figures have entered into the canon. But I think that what's happened more, I hope, is that we've kind of gotten rid of the idea of the canon in the sense that you can't teach everything. So you present your students more with like, a more heterogeneous blend of what you're exposing them to with the caveat that like this is, I'm not saying this is the most important stuff, or this is the best stuff. It's like, this is along the theme that we're going to be considering, or like provides us a little sampling of, of what was happening during the time period. And so I do think popular stuff is coming in more and more. It's funny because I feel like that's happening in college classrooms.

But I wonder what your sense is? Like, is that do you think that just for, you know, general readers, the general public who are who are no longer in college or maybe didn't go to college or don't go to college. Like, what do you think they, what do you think their sense is about high-brow versus low-brow? Or like, what I should be reading versus what they want to be reading?

DANIEL: I have a funny thing about that, because a lot of my friends think Bukowski is very high-brow and I think it's just because his last name is long. It's like really easy to consume, like his stuff, you can read it really fast. But I think it's just because like, they like how Bukowski sounds off the tongue.

SARA: It sounds like it should be prestigious?

DANIEL: Yeah, and then it's like, I wouldn't lie, some people would tell me they were reading Bukowski. Like, man, this person sounds like fancy. And then I would read his books. I was like, oh, not at all. It's just a name, it's just a name.

ARIELLE: I'm curious how, how people tend to approach coming into the library, like, do they have a genre that they're particularly attracted to? Do people ever come like sort of looking for edification? Like, what should I be reading?

SARA: Most the time when people come into the library, they... if they feel like they should know, they're getting it from some other outside avenue. When they come in there, and they ask us for help, they're looking for like a good book. So what's something that would be good. So then we start asking questions about what they enjoy, so that we can take that information and apply it out and try to find something that would fit in with what they actually want to read. Just maybe a different author or a different series or something like that.

DANIEL: I think what's like an interesting thing I've noticed is how the like the things that people write, or like when people that things that people request is like, you can kind of see how it like... well, a lot of it is pop culture influenced. And it's like people finding out about things. And I was just thinking of like how The 50 Laws of Power is like a very popular library book and it's because of censorship and I think censorship is also like a big play in how people select things too. So those, I think like pop culture and then also like things in the media and things are what like kind of like, drive people towards like different books. But I do think because of the way the internet works, we don't really get, "I don't know what to read, can you suggest things?" as much as we probably did 50 years ago.

SARA: Oh, absolutely.

ARIELLE: Wow, that's really interesting. I mean, what I would recommend people, I guess, is to think about just sort of broadening what you read, not... not reading things that are harder or better, or whatever that would be or, like, more sophisticated, but, like, it's good to take out a bunch of books at one time, right? And like, the thing that you know, you're gonna love, like, your favorite author has a new book, or you read something online that was like, if you love this, then you'll love that, like one thing that you know you're gonna love. One thing that is a stretch for you in some way, either it's like about something you don't know anything about, or it's something older, maybe it's not like a contemporary thing. And then like what... ask somebody else, something that they love, like one thing that somebody who you know and like recommends to you, those are all sorts of good ways of branching out in terms of what you're reading. So I would definitely say like, don't be ashamed to choose any, to take out any book, like every book is worth reading and has something to offer someone is someone's perspective, just like every person is worth talking to. Like, I'm a strong believer in, you can learn something from anyone, because everyone knows something that you don't, right? And that's true of every book. So like you're gonna learn something also from a book even if you think it's a trashy book or a guilty pleasure book. Like, there'll be some insight in there, even if it's just a sentence that you never had before. And you will have a good time doing it, which is what's more significant.

But I think that like, figuring out ways to encounter more unexpected works, whether they be like you normally read romance, try a mystery. You normally read sci-fi, try romance. Or, you know, I've always wanted to read The Count of Monte Cristo, I'm gonna take it out and no pressure, like you can go between reading the thing that you know you're gonna love, and reading The Count of Monte Cristo. But don't take out The Count of Monte Cristo because you think it's gonna make you smarter to read it, take it out because, you know, you only live once and you've heard a lot about this book, like, let's see what it's all about. And if you don't like it halfway through, it's okay to quit. I think another really funny thing that... that people have associated with this, like guilt, reading and guilt, is a lot of people tell me that they're afraid to start a book because they're gonna feel guilty when they don't finish it. And my response to that is always like, if you don't finish it, you don't finish it, at least you read half of it. There's something valuable about that, too, like, no pressure on having to finish a book because you took it out or because you started reading it.

SARA: I love what you're saying about branching out. I mean, that's the whole point of the challenge, I think, that we hope that people will kind of jump out of their comfort zone, but only as much as they really want to, right? All of our categories are very broad and very subjective. So a guilty pleasure read is exactly whatever you want it to be. And if you're branching out, you know, and you like... your example was romance, read a mystery. There's so many things that are blending genres right now. So find a mystery that has a little bit of romance or find a science fiction that's got a little bit of mystery, like whatever you want to do. And to all of our listeners, if you don't know what that is, come ask a librarian and we'll help you find it.

DANIEL: I do feel like sometimes my guilty pleasures are like reading the thing that like the author that I've read five of his books and the sixth book is probably just going to be similar. I should probably like branch out but I always feel guilty for like reading because it's like, Grady Hendrix I mentioned to you is like one of my favorite horror authors. I'm like, he's got a new book out and I'm like, I'm gonna read it. I should probably read something else, but I'm gonna read it. I feel bad because I'm not branching out.

SARA: There's time for other books, though.

DANIEL: Yeah.

SARA: Like, that's the thing. Why not enjoy something that you're going to consume?

ARIELLE: I also... I mean, I think that it's funny that we have such a different attitude towards books that we have towards TV. To me, that's always seemed funny. And I think part of the reason why it seems funny to me is that I spend so much time thinking about the 19th century. And in the 19th century, books were TV. So like they have none of this hygienic like good for you association with books because books was what they did after work. You get home from work, you're tired. You... sometimes I do not want to read something that is difficult in any way. I don't want to watch something that's difficult in any way. I want to turn on 90 Day Fiancé, or whatever it is, that's just going to be like something engrossing that creates a barrier between the life where I'm like being a professional and doing all sorts of things and the life where I'm like at home with my family and just like cuddling a bed or whatever. And I think books, people forget that books can do that, too. So like, it's funny that we feel this compunction about, like, I'm gonna read four novels in a row by the same author, that, you know, maybe that's not branching out enough or that's too low-brow. But we don't feel the same way about like binging. It's like, I'm gonna binge a TV show because that's what I need to do right now. Maybe what you need to do is read an entire series by one author and not branch out at all. I mean, I agree with Sara, you, there's plenty of time for that. You can branch out later. Like if you're going to a place where it's just bringing you so much joy and so much relief from other things that are going on in your life to just hone in on that series that you can't get enough of, I mean, that... you only have your one precious life. You should do that.

DANIEL: Thank you for validating my choices.

SARA: Well done. Okay. Let's ask one more question and then let's take a break.

DANIEL: Okey-dokey.

SARA: Because I want to ask one, we've talked a little bit, we've kind of touched on it a little bit, this whole idea that most things associated with guilty pleasures are chick lit, right? You call it femme. In the library world, I think we generally call it chick lit. Which I don't like that phrase. But anyway. These would be like romances, cozy mysteries, the ones where you're like knitting and you're just cozy but somebody died and you're gonna investigate it. Why not? But we don't really talk the same way about bro lit. Maybe your Tom Clancy, your westerns? Who else would you throw out as a bro that we were talking about this?

DANIEL: Um, Clive Cussler.

SARA: Okay, okay. And now I think isn't... aren't there like 15 authors writing for Clive Cussler?

DANIEL: Yeah.

SARA: James Patterson, whatever. I mean, these are still things that have some sort of value, but we don't talk about them with the same amount of like, shame as we do, I think, the more femme novels. Do you have a take on that?

ARIELLE: Yeah. I mean, look at who reads them. People like to read things, people like to read things that represent themselves. It's very comforting. I mean, that's what we started this whole conversation talking about that like, there is a real catharsis in seeing your own experience represented. I wouldn't want to take that away from anybody. I think if you're a bro who likes reading, bro lit, you should read bro lit. It's nice to see your own experience represented. But there's a very, there's a big difference between reading and enjoying bro lit and then like shaming people who consume chick lit, right? Because they're doing the exact same thing. They're seeing their own experience represented. And so while we've been talking a lot about how the branching out is important and I maintain that it is, I think you do both. Like, you read the thing that represents you and your experience. And then you also read the thing that has nothing to do with your own experience because you want to learn what it's like to be somebody else in this world or inhabit somebody else's perspective for a little bit. And reading is a really safe and comfortable and easy way to do that. And so I think that like, again, don't shame anybody for reading what they read, but also, you know, have an awareness of the fact that there's a supremacy to being like, the fiction that represents my identity is somehow better than the fiction that represents other people's identity or that, you know, I don't have any business in knowing about that. I think it's funny that some people, some consumers of bro lit might be embarrassed to read chick lit because, you know, it's actually like femininity and sexuality that's making them uncomfortable, not so much the low-brow nature of the fiction itself.

SARA: Okay, well, let's take a quick break.

DANIEL: Yeah, let's take a break.

SARA: Because we have been talking and this is so fun. But we want to hear about the latest and greatest in library services. So we're taking a quick break, have some water, and then we'll be back and talk a little bit more about this, how attitudes are changing, which I think we've sort of touched on in act one, but we'll dive in in act two.

DANIEL: Cool, yeah. See you soon.

VOICEOVER: The Wichita Public Library has entered the world of streaming with Kanopy. Library cardholders can now access Kanopy's massive collection of movies, TV shows and educational content from The Great Courses. There's content for children, adults, and foreign language options too. Cardholders get seven free checkouts a month. And Kanopy is constantly updating their library so there's always something new to watch. To find out more, please visit wichitalibrary.org/kanopy -- K-A-N-O-P-Y, Kanopy. Just one of the many services provided to you from the Wichita Public Library.

DANIEL: And we're back. You're listening to Read. Return. Repeat. And we're talking with Arielle Zibrak about category 4, guilty pleasures.

Lots of people might choose a true crime book as a guilty pleasure. But the true crime genre has been criticized for exploiting victims of tragedies such as the recent Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix series. Is there a way to consume that kind of media ethically?

ARIELLE: It's interesting because I feel like, you know, with the example that you gave, the concern is the true part of it. So when we're dealing with a real crime that actually happened and actual victims and actual victim's family, it's really different than if you're dealing with like a fictional crime. So I think one thing to ask is like, why does a crime have to be true, or why can't it be fictionalized? So if you like true crime -- I'm not saying there are no circumstances where you can read true crime. And I'll expound on that a little bit. But I think that it's just worthwhile pointing out that there's a very long history of fictitious, you know, crime fiction, crime media. And there's nothing wrong in consuming that per se, except there's a different... there's two kinds of ethical quandaries that I think we need to think about at least. One is the true part. So you know, this is subject to everybody's... everybody's opinion. And it's also a question about journalism.

But I do think that it's worth interrogating the idea that we are taking entertainment from somebody else's tragedy. But I'm very hesitant to, like, condemn any genre wholesale. Because I do believe... I think that some media does, you know, give us messaging that might run against our personal views or values. But I don't think the solution to that is to not ever consume it, nor do it like just in the same way that I wouldn't support the banning of any book, regardless of what it said. Because I think that media should always be an occasion for community and conversation and questioning what you think or believe. And so I feel like if you find yourself in a position where you're consuming the same kinds of things over and over and never deviating from that, again, branch out, that's the problem to me, not so much like the contents of any particular genre, or like I can't say there's something terrible about true crime on the whole. There are a lot of things, works of true crime that I love. But I do think that it's a genre that's run into some problems in terms of the way that it... because there's been such a popular thirst for it, I think that there has been some exploitative coverage of crimes, books about crimes, media, movies, TV, podcasts. So it's a tricky one. It doesn't have like a yes or no answer for sure.

DANIEL: But as far as like, ethical consumption, do you find like... how do you feel like with people kind of looking at Laura Ingalls Wilder now? I'm not going to shame a 7 year old that's reading Little House on the Prairie because of like, what's coming out about, like, her attitudes towards Native Americans. And it's kind of like... do you feel like those kinds of that kind of ethical consumption where it's like, do I read this, even though like, this author from 200 years ago, even though he was a bad person or something? Like, those kinds of questions are coming into play in how people consume media.

SARA: Can you separate the art from the artist?

ARIELLE: Yeah. I mean, I'm never going to tell someone not to read something. So I think, you know, if you read... if you're reading Mark Twain, and you realize, you know, this is, I'm reading Huckleberry Finn and this seems like a pretty racist description, I wouldn't say don't read Huckleberry Finn, I would just say after you read Huckleberry Finn, read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, like read accounts written by people who were actually enslaved, so that you have a deeper understanding of what that's like. So if you have like a little something go off in your brain where you're like, I'm not sure how I sit with this ethically, I don't think the solution is stop reading the thing you're reading. I think it's read something from a perspective that broadens your understanding of like the subject that the thing you're reading covers. So if you're reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, it might make some sense to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, or to read Our Indigenous Continent, which is an excellent book that just came out that's sort of a longer history of Native American life in the United States. So like, I really believe in generating your reading lists based on what you're currently reading. So like, what did I love about this book is a great question that can propel like, we often do that, that sort of algorithmic kind of what's my next read? Like, I liked this, so I'm going to read something else that's like it when actually I think sometimes a good tack to take is like, I am reading this, which I really liked, but it's totally lacking in this other perspective, will now read something that this book isn't, that this book is not.

SARA: So let's switch gears a little bit and Daniel, I'm going to take a question I was gonna have you ask. TikTok is still a cultural phenomenon right now. And I feel like in this younger generation is less like, they don't have guilt about the things that they enjoy, right? They post about it, they do funny videos and they dance and they have a great time. And they just openly enjoy the things that they enjoy. There's no shame, there's no guilt. Do you think that this is the beginning of like a greater attitude shift towards how we approach this concept of guilty pleasures?

ARIELLE: I think this generation, you know, the TikTok generation, whatever you want to call them, is so great for so many reasons. And one is what you say, like a lack of guilt or shame. But I also think that part of that has to do with a kind of like realism that they have so many sort of hard realities that can't be denied, you know, ranging from climate change to having been in school, throughout the pandemic, to economic circumstances that they face that previous generations hadn't faced. And so I think that pleasure becomes really important because they're more keenly aware of the obstacles that they're going to be facing. And I've noticed with my students, they increasingly take like a more practical approach to dreaming of their future.

You know, when I first started teaching, like 15 years ago, students were still very much on that train that I think my generation was on, which is like, I want to be super successful, I want to be like an executive, or I want to be the president, or I want to be a doctor, lawyer, whatever their definition of success was, I want that, I want to attain that. Whereas I find that my students are much more like, I want to have a happy life. You know, I want to open a bakery or I want to go into business with my brother, or I want to be an elementary school teacher, like they want to do things that feel rewarding and satisfying. And so I think that's connected to this phenomenon that you're observing where it's like, if you have this -- and what we were talking about regarding productivity -- like if you have this view of life, like the point of life is a race that you win, or like a title that you attain, or an image that you want to project, then you're gonna have a lot more feelings of guilt or shame, because you have created this image of yourself that you can constantly measure the present iteration of yourself against. Whereas if the goal of your life is to like, have real and satisfying relationships with other people to find enjoyment in your daily life, to not impact your environment or others in a negative way, then you're naturally going to experience less guilt or shame because you're not, you're driving your own actions based on your own desire, your own sense of integrity, not based on an abstract goal. That's, you know, in some ways, externally determined.

So I do feel hopeful about that, that I think there's... there's less all kinds of shame, not just media shame. The word that hasn't come up today, which is interesting to me because it usually does in these kinds of conversations is taste, which is, you know, a very personal thing. And I think that the other thing that people can do to sort of eliminate this guilty, the concept of like, feeling guilty about media consumption, is recognize the fact that everybody has their own taste. And there's no, there's no prize for having the best taste. Like, you just have to recognize that your taste is different from someone else's taste. So if you read something that you think is crap, which I do all the time, I read things that I think are crap, but to me, I recognize it's to me, like, somebody else might love it. And I would never want to make them feel bad about consuming that thing just because I, it happens to not be something that I like.

DANIEL: What do you think a book club should look like in regards to like how people approach book clubs? It's like, do you feel like there's gatekeeping going on in kind of those smaller micro interactions of like people discussing novels and things?

ARIELLE: Well, you might be surprised to know that people usually don't want to have an English professor in their book club.

DANIEL: They don't want librarians either.

SARA: That's not true. They love it.

ARIELLE: I don't get, I usually get invited to a book club as a guest. But I think book clubs are great. And I think that there are so many different ways of doing book clubs. As with everything we've been talking about, I think the more varieties of people that you can get into your book club, the better because, in my experience as an English professor talking to classrooms full of students all the time, right? I always have the best conversations when there are non-traditional students in the class. So students who are not the traditional college age, like who have had more life experiences. When there are people who come from different class backgrounds, different countries, different geographical backgrounds, different racial backgrounds, different religious backgrounds. What you want in a book club conversation, a really lively book club conversation is disagreement.

SARA: I agree.

ARIELLE: So you, if you're having a book club with people who have very similar lives to your own, you're not going to really learn a lot about the book. Because one of the most important things that we can learn about a book is how somebody else and one of the coolest is how somebody else can read the exact same book that we read, and walk away with a completely different interpretation or message or favorite part or favorite character. And so, like, I find sometimes the most exciting things to happen in the classroom come from the most basic questions like when I say, what's his deal, or wasn't it weird when that happened, and just hearing different people's personal responses, what they were thinking about, what they were feeling, at a certain moment in a fiction. I learned so much about what that fiction is doing from them, because I really do believe that some of the best writers and the most talented writers are the ones who can elicit so many different kinds of responses from the same thing.

So I would say keep your, you know, sort of... keep your structure minimal, keep your questions general, and keep your the people who attend the book club as diverse as you possibly can. Because if you, if what you want to do is really learn from the book and enjoy an experience of hanging out with people like bonding over something that you all do have in common, which is that you've all read the same book, then creating that kind of an environment I think is gonna yield the best results. And in fact, that's like, one of the things that I love the most about reading is that when you read the same thing as someone else that can talk about it, you can come to a place of like commonality regardless of how different you are from that other person. And so it becomes like a really easy and accessible way to have really rich and interesting and deep conversations with people that you might not know how to otherwise have if you weren't like working through the medium of the book.

SARA: Final question, right? We probably need to wrap this up. We don't want to take up all of Arielle's time. Do you think that people in our generation and our parents' generations, that we will just like ever let go of the guilt that we feel about the things that we enjoy?

ARIELLE: I think I did it.

SARA: You did it? Well, so did we.

ARIELLE: I feel guilt about a lot of stuff.

[LAUGHTER]

But I don't ever, I don't feel guilt about the media that I consume. And one of the things that I really trained myself to get over, which is like a disease in academia, is pretending to know something that you don't know. I think a lot of people feel guilty or like ashamed of that they're not that smart if they haven't read something, or they're not aware of a current news event. And the reason why I worked so hard to get myself out of that is because it is such a bad policy in terms of if you're someone who wants to learn and grow. So like, if somebody mentioned something that you don't know about, and you pretend you know about it, they're not going to tell you about it or explain it to you, and you might forget and never look it up. So you've totally missed an opportunity, not only to learn something you didn't know before, but also to bond with somebody else through like, hearing them share their knowledge. And if that person is going to judge you because you haven't read that, or you don't know that, you don't want that person to be friends with you anyway. So I mean, I think that, like the most important consequence of feeling guilt, the one that we have to be the most vigilant about, is when it prevents us from growing or like experiencing pleasure, or, you know, living our lives to their fullest.

So I think, yes, there's hope for all of us, maybe not like a total amelioration from guilt in all of its forms. But I really think the more you think about it, it's silly to feel guilty because of the song you're listening to or the book you're reading or the show that you're watching. There's just no reason for it. Honestly, it doesn't say anything about you as a person. And I think that part of the reason also why we have this so much and it's so attached to our generation is like, we are kind of part of the rise of what we consume, defining who we are, whether that be like music or the things that we put on a social media or dating profile. Like I like these authors, I like these shows, I like these movies, that we started to buy into this idea that what we consume is our identity, you are what you eat, right? And while that's true in some way, I don't think that like, if I know that you habitually read all of the novels of Clive Cussler, I'm not going to assume something about who you are because that's true. Like you like that, that's fine. There's a lot more to know about you. And I would hope that other people would start to do the same to recognize that like, what we read or what we're into is, is maybe in some ways indicative of some things about us or our personality or background, but there's so much more that's there. And so you shouldn't feel that you're representing yourself when you're sharing what you like to read or what or what you like to consume.

SARA: Arielle, thank you so much for talking with us today. It was an absolute pleasure to dive in to guilty pleasures with you. Just a wonderful talk.

DANIEL: Yeah.

ARIELLE: Thank much for having me and Wichita is so lucky to have such a vibrant and wonderful public library system. I hope that the people who live there take advantage of it and recognize that they have such a good thing going for them.

DANIEL: Thank you.

SARA: Well, our parking lot was full today. So I think people are here. They're enjoying this.

ARIELLE: Awesome librarians, too.

SARA: There's windows on either side of this room that we're in. And so people keep walking by and looking at us.

DANIEL: It's kind of like having a live studio audience. Thank you again, and I look forward -- or do you have any, are you writing, still doing any of the writing that you did for like McSweeney's and The Toast at all?

ARIELLE: Yeah, I still, I write for McSweeney's occasionally. I published something with them I guess in 2022. Not, it's not like my main thing. I'm working on a couple other books right now. And I have an article coming out. That's more of like a public facing article, but it's in a more academic-y, it's like an essay in an academic journal. I've been writing a little bit about the American West, which is a new topic for me. But I've lived here long enough that I have started to think about it more and more.

DANIEL: That's cool.

SARA: Do you want to share anything with our listeners? We probably should have given you that opportunity to share about the things that you're working on.

DANIEL: Plug away.

SARA: Yeah, give us some plugs. Shout out.

ARIELLE: I have, so I have a book coming out at the end of this year from the University of Massachusetts Press called Writing against Reform, which is a kind of more academic book about the rise of reform literature during the progressive era. And some of the more canonical authors that we might be familiar with, like Henry James and Edith Wharton, who resisted political literature on the grounds that art should be a kind of discursive space where we don't, you know, endorse explicit positions. And the other stuff I'm working on, it's kind of, it's going to be a while off the gate so I don't feel the need to publicize it yet, but I appreciate the opportunity. And yeah, it's, it's been a blast chatting with you both.

SARA: Great. Well, we'll look for those when they come out.

ARIELLE: Definitely read Guilty Pleasures, which is out.

SARA: We're working on getting it here at the Library. We didn't get it in time to read it before our interview, but we read all of your... we read the some of your other articles that we'll definitely share in our show notes so that other people can get familiar with your work as well.

ARIELLE: Wonderful.

DANIEL: Thank you. Have a great day.

ARIELLE: Take care.

DANIEL: Take care.

VOICEOVER: Did you know that the Wichita Public Library offers a large selection of digital magazines for free? They're easy to access and are now available to you on the Libby app. You can download Libby from your phone or tablet's app store, sign in with your Wichita Public Library card and start browsing immediately. Magazines can be found under the guide section on Libby and include popular magazine titles about news and politics, cooking, celebrity news, healthy living, and more. For additional information on Libby, please visit wichita.overdrive.com.

JENNY, VOICEOVER: Here are some reading recommendations for category 4, a guilty pleasure read, from our community of readers in the ReadICT Facebook group. To join in on the fun, log into Facebook and search for the group #ReadICT Challenge and click join. You can also find more reading recommendations for this and other categories by visiting wichitalibrary.org/readict.

IAN, VOICEOVER: The House across the Lake by Riley Sager. I chose this book because everyone involved with this book should feel guilty. The publisher, the editors, the author, and maybe even the library for loaning it to me.

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory. I've been a hopeless romantic for as long as I can remember. Read Sweet Dreams books in elementary school, Danielle Steel in junior high and high school. Now I try to read books with more substance. But when I need something fun and a little naughty, I reread The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory. That was the first book of hers I read and I've since read all her other books. But I go back to The Wedding Date over and over again. It's a fun combination of romance, fashion and food.

How Y'all Doing? Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived by Leslie Jordan. Highly recommend the audiobook, as his delightful intonation injects the necessary playfulness, authenticity and poignancy. Bonus: he was a voracious reader and makes several book recommendations.

My Hero Academia volume 31 by Kohei Horikoshi. I in no way feel guilty about my love of anime or mangas. I watched every episode of Sailor Moon and Pokémon while in college. I kind of fell out of it and when I had my kids, but the first time I saw Attack on Titan, I was back into it. I highly recommend checking out mangas. There's pretty much one for everyone. My Hero Academia is one I've been mostly watching for a few years now. I have several mangas and I'm trying to get caught up in them. It's a world where everyone develops a superpower, so being a superhero is a job you can go to school for. The main character is obsessed with becoming a superhero but never develops a superpower. He has a chance encounter with his idol and is passed down his superpower. I really like all the different characters and their powers.

JENNY, VOICEOVER: Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. There are truly no words for how much I absolutely love this book. Warnings for language, sexual content and liberal democratic values.

Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer, the follow-up to his novel Less. As in the first book, Less is both incredibly bright and deeply clueless. As a main character, he remains amusing but somewhat annoying. My favorite thing about these books is the way Greer describes things. For example, toward the end of the book, Less is in the South at an event. The location is described as a spot between two rivers, presumably so the gators can fill their buffet plates from both sides.

A Time to Kill by John Grisham. I definitely have a weak spot for courtroom thrillers. This was far, far better than I expected.

Spare by Prince Harry. You can't read this and not have compassion for what Harry and especially Meghan were put through. It feels like a lot of the family issues are cultural differences. But the British press blows things up and blatantly lies to a whole different level. I was a bit entertained. He always refers to William as Willie, but calls himself Harold when his brother is speaking to him.

SARA, VOICEOVER: Oh my gosh, that was such a good episode.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: It really was.

SARA, VOICEOVER: So what are you going to read for category 4, Daniel?

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: I can't decide. But I think I might finally jump into the Twilight saga.

SARA, VOICEOVER: Okay. I read that a couple years ago. Obviously, you must be a little bit familiar with it. Are you Team Jacob or Team Edward? I forgot his name for a second. That's awful.

Are you Team Jacob or Team Edward?

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: I think I'm Team Jacob just because I'm a big fan of jean shorts.

SARA, VOICEOVER: Yeah, that makes sense. I see that for you.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: Thank you.

SARA, VOICEOVER: So a list of the books discussed in today's episode can be found in the accompanying show notes. To request any of the books heard about in today's episode, visit wichitalibrary.org or call us at (316) 261-8500.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: Thank you to Arielle Zibrak for talking and sharing your expertise with us in this episode. We'd also like to thank those of you who shared recommendations for category 4.

SARA, VOICEOVER: This has been a production of the Wichita Public Library and a big thanks goes out to our production crew and podcast team.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: To participate in ReadICT Reading Challenge, please visit wichitalibrary.org/readict. Stay connected with other ReadICT participants on the ReadICT challenge Facebook page. Find out what's trending near you, post book reviews, look for local and virtual events, and share book humor with like-minded folks. To join the group, search #ReadICT Challenge on Facebook and click join.

SARA, VOICEOVER: And don't forget to log your books in the reading tracker app Beanstack. Each month you log a book in the challenge, you're eligible to win fun prizes. If you need any assistance signing up or logging books, give us a call, reach us on chat, or stop by your nearest branch.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: You can follow this podcast through the Anchor app or stream episodes on whatever platform you listen to podcasts on. If you like what you hear today, be sure to subscribe and share with all your friends.

SARA, VOICEOVER: Bye.

DANIEL, VOICEOVER: Bye.