Guest Blogger: Chris Roberson

(Chris in Calgary)

What book/author is a guilty pleasure for you?

I don’t really feel guilty about any of my pleasures these days. When I was younger, particularly in college, I used to be self-conscious about reading things that I assumed my classmates and professors would judge to be “trash”--pulp novels, superhero comics, franchise tie-ins--and squirreled them away, only reading them in private. Better to be seen in public with a John Barth novel or a collection of Jorge Luis Borges stories than a Peter David Star Trek novel or the latest issue of Legion of Super-Heroes, I thought. But as I got older, I began to care less and less what other people thought about my reading choices. I finally reached a point probably best encapsulated by a line of dialogue spoken by Jean-Luc Picard in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint”--“If we are to be damned, let’s be damned for what we truly are.”

What book would people be surprised to learn that you enjoyed?

The book that’s farthest outside my wheelhouse that I really enjoyed was probably Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Or possibly Frederick Kohner’s Gidget, for many of the same reasons. I read a great deal of “chick lit” in the run-up to writing the first version of the time-travel novel eventually published as Here, There & Everywhere, trying to capture what seemed to me an authentic female voice for the main character, Roxanne Bonaventure. Of all the stuff that I read, Fielding’s and Kohner’s books were the two I enjoyed the most, to the extent that I would have read them happily even if it hadn’t been for “research.”

Chris Roberson writes novels, stories, and comics, but his real ambition is to become a superhero. He has successfully devised the perfect secret identity—no one will expect a thing—but the superpowers have, so far, proven more difficult to arrange.