Category: Book Reviews

Lady Chatterley, the quintessential cheater, more notorious a tragic figure even than Madame Bovary, is at the center of a story that both rouses and irritates me. Written in a time when sex was for young people and married couples and intellectualism ran wild, Lady C, as the author was wont to call it, told a story of romantic love that heals and inspires.

Lady Chatterley has four lovers altogether. One is of her youth; young, eager, appreciative, but set apart from the care and devotion that often grows from carnal engagements. He and she teach each other of sex separate from thoughtful care, though it does sound like an adventure and if she had had the chance she might have found love without heartache first. Her second lover is her husband. They have a short time together before he goes to fight in the Great War and when he comes back he is paralyzed below the waist. For the next ten years, she lives with him and cares for him, but his overly cerebral analysis and his empty but popular writings slowly, slowly drive her towards the arms of a young playwright, her third lover. He is young and frantic, passionate with a baseline of bitter resentment. He once angrily scolds her for bringing herself to orgasm, petulantly whining that no woman ever came at the same time he did (and not surprising, with only two minutes to work with). Her third lover is the woodsman, the gamekeeper her husband hired without care but casually, thinking of the decision as his hereditary right to the lives of the lower classes. Finally, Lady Chatterley discovers a man of endurance and variety that brings her the kind of long-term satisfaction a thoroughly fucked woman possesses.

Through each adventure, the author uses monologue and long form prose to outline his own ideals. Monologues delivered by windy intellectuals make it clear that Lawrence doesn’t believe in life without sex because their long discourses praising the mental life as superior to the physical are punctuated by Lady Chatterly’s internal skepticism. Long form prose, very poetic and descriptive but with a strange habit of repetition, illustrate the high esteem Lawrence holds the feminine and sensual sex. I can see why, in 1928, this book was considered pornographic: Lawrence uses strong and transparent language to describe our Lady’s various lovemakings and hold up sexual passion as a form of healing. To me, now, in my circumstance and in today’s sexual climate, I felt only moments of surprise as opposed to the appall and disgust that must have followed in the postwar, puritanical social climate.

The books ends without really ending so we don’t know what happens to the Lady but there are some interesting things that jumped out at me. The irritating one is that it’s obviously written by a man who has no idea what being a woman is like and failed to consult any in the writing of this novel. He often refers to ‘her woman’s instinct’ and ‘her womanly senses’ and all sorts of things that are universal to humans but are written as the sole property of women. I found my eyes rolling regularly as I came across silly passages like that where he wrote her behavior as if it’s just what women do and she as a person had nothing to do with it or as if women have some kind of special powers or some foolishness. It felt to me as if I were reading what someone wished were true and in that way it very much was a romance novel.

I also noticed that the Lady’s husband was incredibly progressive, granting her license to take discreet lovers and even to have a child by someone since he was unable to. I find his actions admirable, if the reasoning behind them a little flimsy. He and his intellectual friends don’t value the pleasures of the flesh and so he doesn’t realize what she is missing. My partner has noticed that if we go longer than four or five days without sex, I get emotional, irrational, and weepy. She went nearly ten years! and he didn’t even notice. Of course he allows her her affairs, not because he realizes how important it is but because he doesn’t believe it important at all. What a dope.

The final take-away, and one that I am pleased with, is the idea that sexual passion is important for our emotional and even physical health. In her years between the playwright and the woodsman, she begins to waste away, lose her appetite, become listless and gray, and generally suffer neglect and ennui. Her health recovers rapidly as she moves into her affair and it sounds like the sex is great, if a little romanticized. While fanciful in this story, the idea that sexual health is important to overall health is one I heartily stand by. I like to joke that I’m doing my part to prevent prostate cancer by ensuring regular activity, and getting your heart rate up a bit isn’t a bad thing 😉

Overall, I found it sweet in some ways, silly and overly poetic in others, and not as much a pleasure to read as the Outlander novels I also took with me. I would be curious to read a modern rewrite, using more common language and pacing more evenly. While I didn’t respond with any strong emotions, I will say that the mild romantic reaction it did provoke was well timed. Reading it with the sun and later the stars drifting overhead, the twitter of birds in the trees and the occasional swish of a single car on the lonely road the only reminder of civilization, my inclination towards amour rose luxuriously. Reading about how a sexual connection had the power to energize, educate, demoralize, please, or anger, and in explicit, sometimes even playful terms I was grateful for the proximity of a willing partner and the privacy of a closed door. I can see why, when video based pornography and more explicit writings weren’t available, this book titillated and aroused many of its readers in a relatively healthy and comfortable way.

As you well know, I love science fiction because it posits bizarre but universal circumstances and watches humanity respond. Orson Scott Card asks how we would respond to an inscrutable alien race. Ursula K LeGuin asks what we would do in response to gender imbalances and another messiah figure. Hoyle and Elliot ask what we would do when given a gift that seems too good to be true.

The book is slow to begin but short. A long afternoon is plenty of time to follow Dr. Fleming, brilliant astronomer and computer genius, as he discovers a signal from the Andromeda galaxy, interprets it, and comes to deal with the results. The signal codes for a computer faster and more complex than anything dreamt of at the time (written in the 60’s, set in the 70’s) and a program to feed into the computer. While Dr. Fleming and his team work to build and run this supercomputer, political forces push and pull and Fleming himself begins to suspect that this gift has strings attached. The computer begins to learn about humans and prompt them to experiment, eventually resulting in the creation of Andromeda, the beautiful young woman who may be the salvation of humanity or its destruction. Through it all, Dr. Fleming fights with himself, his friends and colleagues, and the powers that be, trying to learn the truth and prevent eventual disaster.

While the book is an easy read, it is not particularly action packed or fast paced or detailed. Character development is left to the reader to infer as large blocks of time pass with only a few sentences to mark them. I would have enjoyed more details in general because I love the act of creating images in my mind that reflect the action. I feel so much more involved in books that give me more to work with. That being said, I think the authors, one of whom is a professor, expect a certain amount of autonomy in their readers. It’s as if they gave me what I needed to craft the story and left the details for me to fill in. The details that are there are creative and interesting. They describe one man’s voice as ‘whinnying’ and Andromeda is described as blonde, with high cheekbones and very baltic looking. I’ve never seen that descriptor but I imagine that the readers of the 60’s did. It is clear that the authors are scientists and academics as the villains of the book are of course the government and the military while the scientists are the last line of defense in a war no one knows is on.

The interesting scenario is this: the computer Fleming creates and the woman it designs present a cheat for the British government. With her ability to communicate directly with the device and with its vastly superior problem solving ability, the government has a quick fix for medicine, agriculture, economics, and defense. However, it is alien technology which Fleming suspects has an ulterior motive. It is almost inevitable that the bureaucratic powers attempt to monopolize the advantages and trivialize the dangers of this new technology, even after several ‘accidental’ deaths by electrocution.

By creating a beautiful woman to act as its liaison, the machine takes advantage of gender dynamics to disarm the overwhelmingly male authority figures. While raising awareness about gender stereotypes was likely not the primary goal when writing this book, the fact that the authors chose to use a female character to serve as the ‘slave’ of the computer illuminates a deep seated perspective of women as subservient and sexual to the exclusion of individual personality. One of the politicians licks his lips when looking at her inert body during its development and our protagonist uses kissing and caressing to try to show her what it’s like to be human. These acts make sense in context and are extremely likely under the circumstances, but that’s part of why this choice raises the issue of women in storytelling. It’s supposed to show how bad the nasty politicians are and how achingly human Fleming can be but it feels cliche in what was otherwise nontraditional story telling. Add to that the fact that Andromeda loses her life only hours after she gains freedom from the machine and we see a female character who has nothing to offer except as a foil for male characters.

The romance was equally placid. She’s a spy set on him and he’s a big brother type who falls easily in and out of ‘love’. She’s conflicted about her roles and he’s oblivious and childish. Perhaps it’s just human but it’s so far outside my experience that it rings hollow. I almost don’t even remember the love interest because she spent the whole book wringing her hands and trying to get out of her responsibilities.

While I found the book entertaining, it is also jolting; plodding and skipping ahead by turns. The first half of the book is about Fleming discovering the message, decoding it, getting excited, getting dejected and playing around with boats and fast cars like a teen hit hard with affluenza, getting passionate, getting apathetic, and eventually getting his way but not really. I love the idea of finding, creating, and figuring out a trojan horse from outer space, but I feel like a rewrite could make so much more from this concept. The writers are obviously intelligent, but so much is missing that it feel less than a news story. It could have been a short story and had a greater impact while taking less time to write or read. It is a good idea and the writers are obviously intelligent, but perhaps I’ve been spoiled by detailed writing that paints rich images in my mind and find a book that relies on me to fill in the gaps too abrupt to enjoy in retrospect. While reading it it was great but I’m already prepared to move on.

Michael Pollan writes about food. I love food. I wasn’t as huge a fan of In Defense of Food because I felt it more opinion than research and it was the research and story-telling factor of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that so enthralled me. In The Botany of Desire he again tells the story of food in an engaging and contemporary way.

Pollan chooses four foods to represent or tie to four human desires: the apple for sweetness, the potato for control, the tulip for beauty and cannabis for intoxication. As he tells the history of each plant, he ties in contemporary thoughts about how we treat the earth, ourselves, and each other and why we behave the way we do. It’s pure conjecture but it’s thought provoking, funny sometimes, interesting all the time, and altogether the kind of book I love to read.

One of these days I’ll live somewhere with enough space to grow my own food. It’ll probably be in Eastern Washington, somewhere quiet where people won’t pester me, but close enough to some kind of city center that I can find friends and food without too much trouble. When I’m out on my plot, sifting through dirt for little potatoes and picking spitters to make into cider, I’ll think of this book and smile to myself about the stories he shares of crazy but kind John Chapman who preceded westward expansion planting apple trees, the tulipomania of Holland that caused an economic crisis, the gentry’s ancient and the McDonalds fry eaters current distaste for a deformed potato, and the mind altering, healing powers of a good old fashioned doobie.

I’m happy to lend it out if you’d like to share my smile.

True love….. we imagine it to be the whisker away of problems, the smoother over of ruffles, the perfect bond that bears up under any pressure, a prettier and more emotional version of duct tape, if you will. In reality, it is a fragile concept, one which McEwan tears to shreds in his novel On Chesil Beach. I love it.

We meet our fairy tale couple on their honeymoon. The story is told through a series of flashbacks inserted into the tale of a wedding night shared by two people, obviously in love. Unfortunately, a combination of miscommunication, assumptions, and cultural conditioning leads to disaster. It’s 1962 in England and the newlyweds haven’t yet experienced the sexual liberation of the sixties and the free love of the seventies. They’ve never had sex themselves, nor have they been able to talk about it between them. He is concerned about coming too quickly, but aside from that is eager to experience this new coming together. She is not only concerned about the coming act, she is viscerally repelled by it. I would guess that she is either asexual or so thoroughly acculturated to sex as a disgusting act that she finds the idea repellent. The flashbacks tell the readers that these two truly are in love with each other and could have a happy future if they can get over this hurdle. The narrative unfolding in the marriage bed tells us that they will not.

Since his preparation for marriage was to abstain from masturbation for a week, we easily predict that his one fear becomes reality; he doesn’t even make it to penetration before his overexcitement causes him to ejaculate all over his new bride. Her revulsion, which she has carefully and painfully controlled until that moment, comes out all at once. In her terror, she races out of the room and onto the beach. She has been preparing for this moment for months, trying to ignore or overcome her gut reaction. She has come up with alternatives, she has prepared a plan, and when he finally follows her to the beach several hours later, she proposes that they live together as married but he pursues other women as he pleases. He, in his petulant anger over wounded pride, rejects the idea and the marriage is annulled. We follow only him through the short and uneventful rest of his life as he comes to regret his decision. Their lives are unusual only in that we have just read their story; careers are had, friends are made and lost, life is lived, and the end is quiet.

I have the benefit of a culture that may not understand sex but at least is engaged in dialogue about it. I can’t decide whether I feel more pity or anger towards him. He’s obviously misguided if he thinks that avoiding sexual release for a week will give him some advantage in his first sexual experience. He is obviously ill-prepared for the idea that someone might feel differently about sex than he does. His constant reinterpretation of her actions as those of a sexually advanced but coy individual is laughably naive, fury-inducingly presumptuous, and disastrously incorrect. We have insights into his character along the way that clue us into his thought process. His mother received a brain injury during his youth which made her a bit crazy in a scattered, loss of focus kind of way and when his father tells him of her injury, he incorporates this knowledge into his world as if it has always been there and he has always known. This tells us that this young man is not only capable of but prefers to believe he knows everything about everyone and has always known it. His interpretation of his bride’s recoil as an invitation fits perfectly with what we know of his inability to think of another before himself or acknowledge the possibility that he is wrong. Even his regrets in his old age aren’t for the pain he caused his once wife, but for the love he missed out on.

She, on the other hand, is confused and afraid. She has spent hours thinking of how to sublimate herself to her husband, how to please him, how to get herself so small, so insignificant that he might be happy. Her inability to beat her own aversion into submission is not her failing, it is the result of natural inclination shored up by years of shame, disgust, and unspoken expectations. Again, I am fortunate to have information, support, and an inclination towards exploration at my back to power my decisions, regardless of what they are. She is not so lucky, as are many women still. I feel for her. Her every effort was for someone else, her every thought for another and still she met rejection.

Overall, the book is well written. By the same author as Atonement and The Cement Garden, On Chesil Beach is poignant look into what it might be like to miss out on so much love and beauty because of fear, confusion, misinformation, anger, and lack of communication. How much better the world might be if none of those things existed.

Once again Mrs. Roach has a hit. Adventures on the alimentary canal indeed; traveling with Mary from nose to stomach to colon and into the darkness of history is an absolute joy! Never would you imagine finding pleasure and fascination in the coprophagic habits of rats and rabbits. Who knew that it’s apparently perfectly survivable to have a hole from your stomach to the outside world, much less that it is regularly done on purpose? For science, of course.

There is no real plot to our little journey from food to fecal matter aside from the logical progression from top to bottom. Reading a book by Mary Roach is like being stuck on an airplane next to an odd stranger who, while others slumber and the world slips past below, gradually ignites a fascination for something you wouldn’t normally even think about. It is the kind of interaction that, after you debark you exchange phone numbers and try to tell your friends about this awesome thing you learned. If you’re anything like me, however, you fail to convey exactly why it’s important that rats eat their own feces and humans think their own farts stink. Not exactly topics for polite conversation, but the voice from the page is so vivid and funny as it narrates her interactions with smell specialists and doctors who perform poop transfusions that her enthusiasm is contagious. We want you to catch it. She and I find the weird things so fascinating that we want to impress its awesomeness upon everyone we meet.

I can’t say much more about the book. Her voice is passionate, her facts are well researched, her asides are hilarious and engaging, it’s an easy read and I would say the subject matter is exceptionally appropriate for teen boys and young people of both sexes. I highly encourage everyone I meet to pick up a copy of any of her books, off or no other reason than to remind yourself of the bliss and joy of curiosity and the satisfaction thereof. It is glorious.

As I walked to my studio the other day, I passed through freeway park to find a book sale put on by the library. One dollar for a paperback, two for a hardback. I couldn’t help myself and so five bucks later I had some fun reading for my vacation. Of course I didn’t have much time to read due to the storm cleanup and party preparations, but I did get one, long, gloriously hot day to sit and do nothing but take in the story of Sister Lucrezia. Historical fiction is almost as fun as actual history and this one in particular was, if not too deep, at least eye opening and interesting.

I described it to a friend as Jane Austen meets Assassin’s Creed. Set in Florence during the reign of the Medici’s, the story follows the youngest daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant. She is a curious and fiery young lady, resistant to ladylike pastimes but gifted with wit, learning, and a passion for painting. Of course this all was essentially forbidden to women, much less unmarked virgins so she navigates a relationship with her mother, a highly unusual marriage, and tensions in the city as the Medici’s fall from power, Florence goes through a religious revival, and power is eventually returned to the secular rulers.

The story is of particular interest to me for several reasons. First, it is a youngest daughter learning to please her family, husband, and self all at once. Obviously a young woman such as myself in today’s social climate has a far easier time, but the relationships between willful daughters and protective parents are timeless. I see in Alessandra reflections of my own past selfishness and willfulness and in her mother echoes of the wisdom and understanding of my own. I also see in the secrets and overlooked betrayals a reflection of the secrets in my own family. Revelations come to Alessandra as she comes into her own as a wife and mother and someone interested in huge political climate. Her father is not who she grew up with but in fact a powerful and recently deceased member of the Medici family. Her brother is a homosexual. The young painter her father discovers in a monetary turns out to have more talent for painting than anyone she has ever met and a powerful dynamic develops between them before his secrets of madness are revealed. Every layer that peels away reminds me of things I discovered as I got older. There are no perfect reflections but the feeling she expresses reminds me of some I experienced under similar circumstances.

Second is the social climate. Florence for some time was becoming ‘the new Athens’ and fostered wealth, art, and learning as ways to celebrate both life and god. During the years of interest in the novel, a friar in the Catholic Church begins preaching fire and brimstone, penitence and punishment. As is wont to occur in such zealotry, everyone goes overboard and this young, curious woman is affected very personally in several ways. Her family’s fortunes begin to fall, her brother is discovered to be a homosexual, something recently outlawed by the religious authorities, the young man her father hired to paint their home’s chapel begins to go insane, and her new husband turns out to be her brothers lover. The relationships are complicated and though the story wraps up a bit too neatly, it is explained away easily enough by the planning and influence of her mother and the young slave girl who has been Alessandra’s companion since childhood.

One other reason I appreciated the story is how the author anchored it to historical fact and when that was unavailable linked at least well known theories into her story. She wove a plausible history for great men and women and for great works of art that remain unexplained. It took a good five or six hours to finish but it was a compelling story with enough action and mystery and romance to keep the plot moving. The candid language was almost a shock to me but was refreshing, as were the suggested study questions at the end of the story. You could feel Alessandra’s discomfort and horror at her first sexual encounter with her husband (imagine trying to have sex with someone you find extremely unattractive. Now imagine being the unattractive one but not knowing why) and later you can feel her pleasure and enjoyment when she finds someone to share love and physical passion with. Her fear during the reign of the friar and religious authorities is palpable through the pages and can quicken the heart.

I would recommend this book fore either very light reading or for young people, between fourteen and twenty. It does have some valuable insights into the history of feminism and also the development of the Italian Renaissance. I know I enjoyed it, but I can’t promise anyone else will.

When I run out of new books to entertain me, I turn to the classics. Obviously the last foray into classical literature was less than successful (see Madame Bovary) however my more recent one was far better. Not nearly as old, Vermillion Sands is a collection of short stories, connected only by geographical location. Written in the fifties and compiled more recently, the stories of Vermillion Sands are a bizarre mashup of science fiction and outright fantasy. As pure entertainment they are brilliant. Fucking brilliant.

The setting is never described completely. It is a resort town located somewhere in California, perhaps, but the reader doesn’t know. It is hot and sandy, but not too hot. The majority of it is beaches and beach towns, expensive villas and shops catering to tourists and the eccentric rich. It is the eccentric rich that form the core of interest. Each story is told from the perspective of an nominally average person, usually male, who lives in a modest place at Vermillion Sands and encounters by chance some wealthy eccentric. An editor meets a poet who fancies herself the muse of poetry and uses magic or something like it to play nefarious pranks. A beautiful pirate ranges the sand lake on her wheeled yacht, looking for an old love and controlling a pack of enormous flying manta rays. A singer is enthralled by a temperamental singing orchid and falls for its charms. A self absorbed socialite has a troupe of performers carve her face in the clouds and drives them to suicide and murder in the process. A house reverberates with the memories of its previous tenants and reenacts their violent relationship on the new owners. Sculptures sing and grow to immeasurable proportions, portraits paint themselves, and fabrics live and react to the emotions of their wearer. The goings on at Vermillion Sands are fantastical. The setting is a beautiful and curious backdrop for beautiful and curious people to live their beautiful and curious lives.

I highly recommend this collection. In fact I have already pressed it upon a friend and it took her only moments to be come enthralled by the characters and peculiarities of J.G. Ballard’s universe. Good for adults young and old, the themes and writing is probably a bit over middle school (except for those precocious readers of which I like to consider myself one). It is also a great bus read or bedtime story because it is a collection, not a novel. I encourage you to pick up any anthologies you can find of his work. If this collection is any indication, it is all magnificent.

Madame Bovary, for years the symbol of wifely infidelity, is a tragic figure in Classic French literature. Married to a widower at a young age, her grandiose notions and desperate search for intoxicating happiness drains every crumb of decency and grace from the lives of her and her family. A true tragedy, Madame Bovary is both a shocking revelation to the people of the time and a cruel morality tale, reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet except without the everlasting fidelity and true love.

Madame Bovary begins as a sweet young girl, loved by her father and schooled in a convent as such proper, beloved young ladies ought. While at the convent, she is exposed to romantic novels and stories, the kind that nowadays would have Fabiola or his sort on the cover. The women in the stories are consumed by love for their heroic renaissance men. The men in the stories know everything and do everything perfectly romantically, perfectly heroically, and perfectly everythingly. Of course we all know those stories set unreasonable expectations but no one told little miss who would later become the wife of a boring but doting widower that expecting her husband to live up to those heroes was destined to make her unhappy.

Sure enough, after the first glow of married life wears off, Madame Bovary begins seeking emotional excitement elsewhere. Like a drug addict she needs new things and more things all the time to excite her. First it is motherhood. She vacillates between being a doting mother and not bothering to care about her daughter. After the joys of motherhood fade, she falls in love. It is a respectable, virginal love and the young man is too proper to pursue it but they both feel it. She smooths over his imperfections with feelings of loathing towards her husband. Flaubert is extremely talented at describing the emotions Madame Bovary goes through in all her cycles of joy and depression. After her young love moves away, she is seized upon by an unscrupulous bachelor and their year long affair seems incredibly indiscreet to me, but there is no indication that the village is aware of their affair. After a dramatic end to her illicit romance, she sinks into a deep depression, much like Bella Swan in modern day Twilight. She rouses from this depression when she and her husband visit the city and she is once again presented with her young love. This time both are determined to consummate this love. Another year is spent in debauchery and frivolity and by this point Madame Bovary’s spending has driven her and her husband deep into debt, with him totally unawares. Her need for novelty and intense feelings has driven her to spending the capital of her youth, energy, and money until there is not only nothing, but less than nothing left. She has ruined not only herself but her loving husband and the future of her innocent daughter. She ends her life and the last few pages describe the extent to which I she has ruined nearly every life she ever touched.

When Madame Bovary was first published, so many women identified with our protagonist that dozens came forward as the inspiration for the main character. Flaubert’s eloquent descriptions of her passion and depression are frequent enough that anyone who feels mildly dissatisfied in their relationships or feels like they need emotional highs to tolerate life can find company in Madame Bovary. As a cautionary tale, it does well for several reasons. The first and most obvious is how dangerous stifling youthful experimentation can be. This young woman has romance novels as her only source of relationship advice, poisonous as they are written to be risqué and unrealistic flights of fantasy. I remember reading my first romance novel as a teenager. My mother didn’t forbid me, nor did she encourage me, she only told me that real relationships aren’t like that and not to be fooled. I feel as though I should thank her for what many young women are not to getting these days. Madame Bovary is an excellent example of why not to let your daughters read twilight or its ilk. Real relationships are not like fairy tales and reading fairy tales as an impressionable young woman, or young men, is extremely hard to get over, specially when parents feel too uncomfortable to talk to their children about relationships and sex.

It is also a cautionary tale against allowing others to take advantage of one’s naïveté. The local merchant uses judicious extensions of credit to trap our Madame in a cycle of debt. The local apothecary discredits Madame Bovary’s husband through mild trickery and judicious rumormongering. Madam’s first lover feeds her lies of love and fidelity to seduce her. The common thread in their downfall is a lack of skepticism. She wants so badly to believe that she deserves a life full of romance and passion that she seizes anything that leads that direction. He believes that he has a perfect life and shrugs off anything that might indicate otherwise. The two make a foolish pair who end their lives miserably and leave their daughter to a life of bitterness and manual labor, bereft of what her parents inherited from theirs.

All in all, I would prefer to have read one of Aesop’s fables. They are far more entertaining and fanciful. I do realize that perhaps the biggest reason for my distaste is my removal from the culture. When published, it so resounded with the women of the time that I have to think that, much like heart of Darkness, it was a conversation that needed to happen at the time and perhaps needs to happen with more conservative families, but Seattle hardly needs the morality tale of the cheating wife full of ennui that mid century France needed. All in all not a bad read. I would recommend it for young women or someone who likes sad endings.

Speaking of, I will say that I do appreciate the manner of her death. Not ironic exactly, but Madame had high ideas of some noble, beautiful, and quiet death but didn’t realize just how ugly her method would be. Flaubert specifically details what she looks and sounds like in death and as someone who finds her ideas foolish I appreciate that he took the wind out of her sails as it were, showing her finally that no matter what she wished, some things are just ugly.

I am often blessed by gifts of books that I may not have otherwise picked up, because they reminded the giver of me in some way. I suppose it should come as no surprise that I would eventually come into possession of some unusual erotica. Namely: monster porn. A conversation between myself and a friend turned towards a new trend of amateur authors writing explicit sex scenes between human women and monsters, in this case, obviously Bigfoot.

Volume one follows three young women as they are kidnapped and gently but firmly forced into intercourse with twelve foot tall hairy creatures. Volume two follows the one who chooses to stay with her Bigfoot because she falls in love with him and decides to join he and his tribe in woodsy living, complete with nightly orgies. Both books are a narrated by the young woman as she is pleasured in nearly every chapter by her Bigfoot and often several others as sharing women is not. Unusual in the ‘tribe’.

The plot is only barely believable and features your traditional Stockholm syndrome and of course fantasies including but not limited to double penetration, enormous penises, forced pleasure, forced orgasm, triple penetration, and oral stimulation. The protagonist’s pleasurable experiences are billed as genuine but don’t include much that I think I’d be comfortable with and much that I actively have ethical issues with such as interspecies sex and rape. In additions, the technical aspects of writing and publishing are often just bad. The author uses passive voice which is always and forever a huge no-no, there are chunks of chapters that are repeated bored for word, and the euphemisms are cliche. At least the author uses them sparingly; she mostly uses explicit language which makes the scenes nice and clear. I might have to appropriate some of her language conventions in my own writing 😉

Despite the technical issues, predictable plot, and force fantasies, I find myself responding physically to the mental input and so, despite my better judgement, I have read them both, in full (mostly) about twice now. I don’t have wifi at my studio so when I have a half an hour and nothing to do with it, instead of using up my data with internet videos, I’ll ‘read a book’ for a while. Because of that I have to give them a four out of five on the sexy scale, though they earn a mere one out of five for actual reading pleasure.

This is my frivolous book review. The next one will be of Madame Bovary and is far less fun :-/ I won’t be able to recommend either books for reading for fun.