I’ve always despised the concept of “guilty pleasures.” Perhaps that is just my native contrarian nature coming out, but when someone asks me, sputtering, “But how can someone like you like rap?” I immediately want nothing more to do with them.

Not that my choices of music, of books, should never be criticized but at the same time I am allowed to critique the critique of me, and also to reject the critic. Which I do with alacrity.

Just like Jo Walton so elegantly does.

Escaping doesn’t mean avoiding reality, escaping means finding an escape route to a better place. Seeing those options can be the file to get through the bars. Anyone who thinks this is a bad thing is the enemy.

It is no exaggeration at all to say that were it not for the music and books I consumed in middle and high school, that I’d be dead now. Tori Amos, Tanya Donelly, Hope Sandoval, Throwing Muses, Faith No More and authors too innumerable and varied to name – these people kept me alive, and showed me a better world that I knew one day that I could be and would be a part of.

And I did become part of, but never would have without their art.

So when people criticize me for reading “bad books” or liking music I’m not supposed to like, I revert to my old Southern ways and lose the eloquence of Walton and say simply “Fuck all ya’ll.”