A Lost Argument, by Therese Doucet. I disliked literally the entire second half of this lightly fictionalized memoir; but I found its first half just so incredibly charming and titillating that I can’t help but to include it in this Guilty Pleasure list. The story of a Philosophy-majoring Mormon who goes off to Brigham Young University for her freshman year, then does some pickup work at her local community college the following summer, where she meets a sexy bad-boy atheist who makes her question every assumption she’s had about life, Doucet has the ability to really hit the sweet spot of yearning and angst that so marks the lives of most college freshmen, a strange and wondrous time when a person is not quite an adult yet no longer a child.
The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, by Mark Leyner. When I first moved to Chicago and got involved with the lit scene in the 1990s, the exquisite nonsense artist Mark Leyner was one of our gods; and after some years recently of flailing about with his career, I’m extremely glad to see him back in fine form with this brand-new novel. Essentially another of the bizarro authors mentioned above, his streamof-consciousness tales are not for everyone, but is just the ticket for fans of, say, Monty Python and Warren Ellis, and have always wondered what kind of unholy baby would emerge from a union of the two.
Under the Harrow, by Mark Dunn. A contemporary post-apocalyptic thriller written exactly like a thousand-page Charles Dickens novel, this fact neatly encapsulates both its good and bad points: for while this story of a Victorian town that slowly learns “The Village” style that they’ve been kept deliberately anachronistic and hidden for a hundred years from the rest of the world at large, as a bizarre experiment by the Cold-War-era US military that just never got shut down, is freaking incredible at points in its details and style, its attempt at Dickensian book length does the taut plot a disservice, which is why it’s a Guilty Pleasure and not on any of our legitimate best-of lists this week. If you’re already a fan of this stuff, though, this is an absolute must-read that you don’t want to miss. CJ
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