Snag Your Copy Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures Assembled By Arielle Zibrak Issued As Manuscript

thought this book was going to be about books, Instead it's a rambling, thrown together, jumbled essay on an array of other subjects, The introduction was long and rambling, The author does talk about books, but then she morphs into an analysis of tv shows and movies.
I didn't agree with most of her assertions, I tend to read books and watch movies and shows for pleasure, not analyze them for every grievance against patriarchy.
This book just seems slapped together for the sake of publishing something, Thanks to Edelweiss and NY University Press for the advance read, As an English major in France, and a French pupil before that, I had experienced some American classics and found them mostly gloomy and unappealing except for Emily Dickinson who's gloomy but whose sensitivity I could really relate to.
I had never thought about the fact that she was a She and that it may have had an unconscious impact on my understanding and my feelings about her work.


Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures is a very interesting read, it appeared I knew so little aboutth cy American literature and that women writers had had such a big impact back then their names have not crossed the Atlantic ocean.
. . it would be funny to see what remains of our nowadays bestsellers inyears,

The second half of Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures drops a bit the literary aspect to focus on movies and, while food for thought, lost me little because of the title "Avidly Reads.
. . ".

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an eArc in exchange of an honest review, Read in a day for my phd proposal, Really interesting and I actually enjoyed it outside of my proposal project, recommended by my tutors, glad I read it.
Somewhat more academic than I expected, with a deep dive into pop culture moments, films, books, and TV.
I was most interested in the chapter on romance novels, though so much of it centred around older romances rather than current ones, which are still often considered in the realm of guilty pleasures.
I fundamentally disagreed with her conclusion that romance is essentially only escapism and doesn't serve other functions, While the media used as examples in the book were fun and interesting and yes, could be called guilty pleasures, I felt that the idea of guilty pleasures itself was lost in favour of exploring other aspects of these cultural touchstonesthe ideas were interesting, but offtopic.


Thanks to NetGalley and NYU Press for the ARC, An academic, cultural studies reading of several “guilty pleasure” texts spanning fromth century novels, to Sex and the City.
I really enjoyed the highly readable and relatable tone, with a healthy dose of humour, It was a good reminder of what layers of shame society places on typically “femme” experiences and content, and motivation to unremorsefully find the pleasure in them.
Excellent! This was a delightful read about an often frustrating subject, For long I've disliked the expression "guilty pleasure" as a way to judge what kind of entertainment is credible or not after all, who's to judge! and Arielle not only elaborates on the issue much more eloquently than I ever could, but she does it showing how detrimental the use of the expression is in other areas as well as helping perpetuate values of misogyny, racism and sexism.


Deeming something a "guilty pleasure" is the patriarchy's way of diminishing, invalidating and removing credibility of women's stories, women's lives and works and Arielle not only proves it but she does it with wonderful humour and sarcasm.


Loved it! Are they "guilty" pleasures or simply pleasures that we are slightly embarrassed about Either way, this Avidly Reads take on romance novels, Sex and the City, romantic comedies, wedding dresses, shoe shopping, and assorted other girly indulgences to see what it is we like about them.
Deconstruct your own lowbrow enjoyments and see if you can figure out why otherwise brainy people secretly enjoy what Professor Arielle Zibrak called Rich White People Fantasies, such as Love, Actually.
It's that rare book that makes you laugh and think at the same time, Full of great insights and humorous asides, this book was an interesting read on the heels of sitelinkThe Heroine's Journey by Gail Carriger.
I think fans of popular culture, romance novels, rom coms, and other femme fictions would enjoy Zibrak's take.
My thanks to Netgalley and NYU Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.


In her introduction to Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak mentions a moment in her childhood when she stood in front of herth grade class to present a report on Nabokov's Lolita the entire sexualized aspect having passed blithely over her, she understood it as "the story of an overprotective stepfather taking his stepdaughter on a very special vacation".
And that was the point where Zibrak had me hook, line, and sinker because I too was once

that child.


At once academic yet personal, lucid, hilarious, and steeped in pop culture, this look at the term "guilty pleasures", especially as it relates to the femme experience, is one of the best things I've read this year.
Part of it, of course, is because I related deeply to the content and the ideas expressed here as it closely reflects concerns and thoughts that I have struggled with regarding women in literature, but I also enjoyed the felicity with which Zibrak was able to move between the personal and the political, the literary and the cultural.


Here's a book that will reward multiple rereads, in my opinion,.rounded up to. Damn, this makes me hate our toxic society and culture a little more than I already do Written by one of my professors.
Great read. Just long enough. The book for all lovers of good romcoms, “chick lit,” and any fictional story dazzled with beautiful dresses and happy endings.
These phrases are never associated of being worthy intellectual pursuits, instead they are seen as trashy and guilty reads targeted for a female population.
Zibraks book is the antidote to all this madness she uses academic theory and a personal interest in the genre to help explain why we have been wrong to categorize “femaleled” stories to be less than other forms of literature.
Zibrak also notes thatof American generaldiction readers are women, and the cultural historian Helen Taylors research found that women are the gatekeepers to libraries, book club, literary bloggers, audiences at literary festivals and our beloved bookstagram/booktok.
A tangent that interests me is why is bookstagram mostly femaleoriented and how does that impact the literature that is circulated within this community

Anyway back to the book Zibraks argument is that women enjoy “guilty” reads and watches as a form of catharsis from the inequities and domination women experience in their day to day.
Even the staunchest feminist can enjoy a story where the prince sweeps the heroine off her feet, but why would we ever indulge in this if we know how to stand on our own two feet Because sometime you just want to give in and stop trying to fix the inequities you face everyday, and simply escape in a story that seeps with an accepted form of male domination.
As Zibrak says, while we may wish for social and political structures to change, fight for them to change, they do not change so another part of why the romance is cathartic and pleasurable is because the romance doesnt attempt to change things in a durable way.
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This review is made possible after receiving an ARC from NetGalley, All opinions are my own, My feelings about socalled "guilty pleasures" are, I think, uncomplicated, Most of the time, the reason people feel guilty for liking the things that they like is because it's not considered cool to like those things.
I don't have any time for that kind of guilt, and I think there's nothing more boring than worrying about what's considered cool and what isn't.
But there's another kind of guilty pleasure: When you watch or read something that you know is actually bad for you, or bad for society as a whole.
TV shows that perpetuate tired stereotypes, for example, or tabloid magazines that result in the actors and musicians we claim to admire being stalked by paparazzi/.
I can get as sucked in by these things as anyone, but I know I'll feel crappy afterward, so I tend to avoid them.
Pretty simple distinction.

Arielle Zibrak feels differently, A good example may be one she cites: those columns in women's/teen girl's magazines where readers can write in to talk about their most humiliating experiences, often having to do with period mishaps and/or embarrassing themselves in front of their "crush.
" Zibrak sees these columns as emblematic of thes, but they've been around much longer than that, I've always tended to think these columns were mildly harmfulbasically teaching young women and girls that they're supposed to feel humiliated about normal human mishaps.
Zibrak sees it differently. In her view, we're already well aware of all of these ways we can be humiliated in an unforgiving culture, and reading about other women/girls living through things we fear can be cathartic.
Helpful, in other words, instead of harmful,

For me, this is a new way of looking at guilty pleasures, and between that and Zibrak's lively, smart writing, I was looking forward to a good reading experience.
The first chapter, about romance novels specifically those with dominant males, fit well with Zibrak's thesis: Given all the conflicting messages U.
S. culture tends to give women about our sexuality, itagaincan be cathartic to see some of these conflicts play out within the confines of a story and come to some sort of resolution.
With romance novels, Zibrak points out, the guilt can actually be part of the pleasure, This made perfect sense to me,

After that, unfortunately, things started to go downhill, The next chapter was about the guilty pleasure of "rich white people fictions"i, e. , movies where the white characters are clearly obscenely wealthy but it's just kind of treated as normal, The analysis of race and class issues in these films was interesting, but Zibrak's ultimate conclusions about why we enjoy these films as "guilty pleasures" were unconvincing.
Ditto the next and final chapter, about wedding movies, where Zibrak focuses a lot of her analysis on Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, which, uh, isn't a wedding movie.


I had other concerns, Zibrak has a strange focus on mostly older material, Why does the romance novel chapter focus on sentimental literature from theth century and romance novels from thes instead of, say, Fifty Shades of Grey Why does the section on rich white people fictions focus on Father of the Bride, of all things I think this entire study would have been so much more relevant if it had centered on "guilty pleasures" of this particular moment.
As it was, I had a strong feeling that most of this book was made up of recycled gradschool papers Zibrak had written years earlier.


My larger concern, though, was with the way Zibrak categorizes the guilty pleasures she discussesromance novels, movies about rich whites, wedding movies and showsas "femme.
" I no longer understand what "femme" even means these days feel free to clue me in in the comments, but be niceI did google it and didn't find anything useful, but deciding certain guilty pleasures are "femme" was too essentialist for my tastes.
So if it's "femme" to like romance novels, what's it called if I, a cis female, prefer classics instead Is that "butch" Masculine Or what I find that whole thing exhausting.
When can we just get rid of all that stuff and just be who we are Soon, I hope!

Near the end of this short book, Zibrak refers to the way we process guilty pleasures as "deeplove/surfacehate.
" For some guilty pleasures, I wonder if the way we truly feel is precisely the opposite: "deephate/surfacelove.
" This is the conflict I would have liked to see this book explore, I suppose I can't fault the book for not being exactly what I wanted, but what I got instead was a disappointment either way.


I received this advance review copy via NetGalley, Thank you to the publisher, .