Guilty Pleasures
This is an archived post, originally published on Be the Story (bethestory.com).
We all have our guilty pleasures. I’ll get mine out into the open now. Firstly, I like Star Trek.
Not so much Voyager or Enterprise. But I really liked the original series and The Next Generation and even Deep Space Nine. Yes, they’re pop pabulum. But they’re solid stories.
To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu
Table of contents:
‣ An American Beginning
‣ Growing Up Different
‣ To Be an Actor
‣ The Trek Begins
‣ Life After Cancellation
‣ Star Trek Lives
‣ Live Long and Prosper
By the way, George Takei’s autobiography, To the Stars, I’ve read and recommend. His story begins with his boyhood experiences as a U.S. citizen in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, a challenging account apropos to the modern political climate. It moved me so much, I almost couldn’t go on. But I did, reliving with him his adolescence, his education as an architect, his passion as a struggling actor, his political activism. The book ends with a stirring tribute to Gene Roddenberry. I was sorry to put it down. By the way, that’s an aside, not a guilty pleasure.
Did I mention his work with Star Trek? Oh yeah, there’s that, too.
Back to guilty pleasures. What is a guilty pleasure? It’s something I like that I couldn’t recommend to someone else. In fact, I’m embarassed even to admit that I like it. Buck Rogers, too. I liked Buck Rogers. I don’t know why. I also really enjoyed the movie Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Well, I guess I could recommend that, with qualifications. But for a sci-fi mystery, it has a pretty stupid plot. And in books, Circle of Gold by Diana Palmer, a corny little Silhouette Romance® I got free from eHarlequin.com.
-TimK