Joe Queenan moons the tyranny of taste and it is good:

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they're not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn't. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through "The Da Vinci Code" is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame. In these people's view, any time spent reading a bad book can never be recovered. They also act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.

Such prissy attitudes are neurotic and self-defeating. Bad books are an essential part of life, as entertaining and indispensable as bad clothing (ironic polyester shirts), bad music (John Tesh at Red Rocks, Phil Collins anywhere), bad trends (metrosexuality, not using toilet paper for a year in order to "help" the environment) and bad politicians (take your pick). I started reading extremely bad books as a boy, when my beloved but slightly unhinged Uncle Jerry lent me the classic Reds-under-the-beds screed "None Dare Call It Treason," and have been reading them ever since.

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One of the main reasons we bad-book lovers go out of our way to make our sentiments known is because it is a way of resisting the hegemony of good taste. If slaves to quality had their way, there would be no thrillers by Marilyn Quayle ("Embrace the Serpent"), no children's books by Madonna ("Lotsa de Casha"), no autobiographies by Geraldo Rivera ("Exposing Myself"). If goodness fetishists were in control of the publishing industry, nothing more hair-raising than Bill Bradley's last book of homilies would ever make it into print. That's right, no books by Shaq, no memoirs by Rue McClanahan, no collections of ruminations and apercus by Dinesh D'Souza. Sound like a world you'd want to live in?

With customary insight, Garrison Keillor once wrote: "A good newspaper is never quite good enough, but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever." I agree. Some people would identify a passion for bad books as a guilty pleasure, but I prefer to think of it as a pleasure I do not feel guilty about, even though I probably should. Bad movies, bad hairdos, bad relationships and bad Supreme Court rulings merely make me chuckle. Bad books make me laugh. And if they ever stop writing books with lines like "Being a leader of the Huns is often a lonely job," I want to stop breathing on the spot.

What's the best bad book you've read lately?