Hey, everyone! Our next book club selection will be Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. Which sounds like a damn fine idea to me. We'll start talking next Wednesday.


But this week, we're talking about the book with the best title ever: Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences. It is a great read--tiny, jewel-like, lyrical essays, sensual and witty and funny. You want to have Barbara Holland come over to your house and sip martinis with you, smoke long black cigarettes and loll about indolently while you scarf down your life's savings in the form of gold-flecked caviar on tiny oyster crackers. The book is lush and sexy and it makes me happy, her ode to the pleasures in life.

It also, I realized, made me a little sad, that things like bacon, like sleeping in, like treating ourselves well, occasionally, have become, as she says, endangered. That things that have always been meant to be indulgences--and as such, occasional pleasures for the occasional occasion--are things that seem, of late, to have become morally reprehensible, irresponsible, even dangerous. I don't want to feel guilty for sleeping in one morning, for skipping the gym one day in favor of curling up and reading, for, on a random Sunday morning, ordering the very overstuffed French Toast and adding real cream to my incredibly strong coffee. I don't want these things to have to be defended, and I don't want to be defensive about it; I want these things to be looked forward to, and enjoyed as completely as possible.

What about you--is it a good thing that some pleasures have become endangered? Have we gone too far, outlawing everything that's good in the world? What makes you feel guilty, and what do you wish you could enjoy without guilt? What's your favorite indulgence?