[For one week in July 2009, I took over as a guest blogger at the Electric Velocipede website while editor John Klima was away. This was the second of the four posts I contributed. My prompt was: “What book/author is a guilty pleasure for you?”]

Really, any reading I do before I've written what I feel is a sufficient amount of fiction for the day is a guilty pleasure. The only hour of the day that is never subject to guilt-tainting is the hour before sleep when I'm too tired to write but not too tired to read.

The hour of the day that is almost always subject to guilt-tainting is the first hour, between 5:00 and 6:00 am, which is normally non-negotiably dedicated to writing. If I'm racing to the end of a really good book, though, and just have to finish it, I will sometimes yield that hour, but I always feel bad about it. Right now, for example, I'm about 300 pages from the end of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and I have a feeling that I'm soon going to be tossing a couple of early-morning writing hours in its ravenous direction.

There are few books I feel guilty about reading in and of themselves. I suppose you could toss the occasional airport or drugstore impulse purchase into the guilty bin, but even the contents of those paperback bestseller racks have something to offer, at least in terms of demonstrating what readers are hungry for in a potboiler.

But, because the question has been asked seriously, I will pull my pants down here and single out one writer as my ultimate guilty pleasure: Dan Simmons. I used to worship Dan Simmons's writing—the way he is able to lurch from genre to genre without benefit of a pen name and reproduce what is most satisfying to each particular brand of readership. He seemed to me the epitome of the consummate professional. But somewhere around the time of Darwin's Blade or the second or third Joe Kurtz novel, I started to grow weary of his hyper-masculine, intellectually snobbish, Marcus Aurelius–worshipping protagonists. No, I went past weary and started to actively hate Dan Simmons's writing.

But apparently the lure of his writing is still strong because, despite my best efforts, I did buy The Terror. I have my eye on Drood. I know I'm going to hate myself as I read those books, but I also know, I'm afraid, that I'm going to read them.

But my really truly most hideously guilty pleasure related to books is buying them and then not reading them.