(image via Flickr)

Grace from Books Without Any Pictures challenged readers to confess their dark reading secrets. Confession is good for the soul, right? Among Grace’s confessions were the fact that she despises The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and that she likes to dog-ear books.

It took me a while, but I decided the time had come to confess.

1. I think I’m in the wrong book group. Sometimes I feel like a Victorian at a nudist colony. (image via photopin)

(image Timothy Actwell via photopin)

You mean I don’t belong here? Translation: You mean you didn’t love The Language of Flowers, State of Wonder, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet? Egads. I did. Image: me, head in sand; fellow book clubbers, hands on hips..

2. I am a traitor to my writing degree. Voice low: I don’t like reading Don Delilo. Egads again. I know, I’m a hopeless plebe. But, isn’t it sort of pointless to point out the pointlessness of existence? Not to mention depressing. Give me modernism, I can handle that–James Joyce, for one, and I can even follow Samuel Beckett to the very inception of post-modernism, and John Fowles to meta modernism. Beyond that, I must bid adieu. Sorry, Don.

(image via Le Royal Box/photopin)

3. Endings must be meaningful.This doesn’t mean the ending must be happy although that helps. If the ending is not happy, it should be heroic (The Orphan Master’s Son) or ironic (Catch-22) or majestic (Cry, the Beloved Country) or beautiful (The God of Small Things).

These are my paltry confessions. What are yours? Do tell! Don’t worry, what happens in the confessional stays in the confessional, limited only by the vast reach of the internet.