en-US Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:27:37 -0700 60 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 11953987
Cherry reveals how seeing her Mom with her lover in a voyeuristic encounter was her first real man, which prompts Penny to confess that her first love was for her Dad, a former college athlete.

Beautiful, erotic and very, very sexy, this confessional and highly personal tale from Vanessa de Sade was originally considered too shocking for inclusion in her anthology, TABOO 2 – Incest Novellas & Stories, and is brought to you here, complete and unexpurgated, for the first time.]]> Vanessa De Sade Esmeralda 4
The format of the story is a clever one: A young woman browses the internet with her webcam, looking for masturbation buddies. She connects with another girl, and the two share some steamy stories to titillate each other as they play with themselves on camera. This allows for a variety of hot little scenes -- miniature stories-within-the-story. In those vignettes, there's material that should appeal to most any reader with a taste for the hot and naughty.]]> 3.44 2011
author: Vanessa De Sade
name: Esmeralda
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/10/14
shelves:
review:
This is a very hot, very well done little erotica story. Vanessa de Sade is a skillful author who writes with lyricism and imagination, rather than just stringing one cliche' after another, as many would-be erotica authors do.

The format of the story is a clever one: A young woman browses the internet with her webcam, looking for masturbation buddies. She connects with another girl, and the two share some steamy stories to titillate each other as they play with themselves on camera. This allows for a variety of hot little scenes -- miniature stories-within-the-story. In those vignettes, there's material that should appeal to most any reader with a taste for the hot and naughty.
]]> 3321545
She is free and untamed; he is neither. With a simple glance, his image is cut into her. Between them develops an attraction that is irresistible, boundless, jubilant and destructive.

Written from both lovers' perspectives, Landscape with Animals explores the lives of two ordinary people through an intense and passionate affair.

But can desire ever really be suppressed, or forgotten? And what does it mean to love someone behind closed doors? Compelling, confronting, erotic, Landscape with Animals shows us the power sex has to express our identity, and sometimes to erase it.

'When I ask myself where I can find sustained high quality erotic writing, the best example that comes to mind is Sonya Hartnett's pseudonymous novel (as Cameron Redfern) Landscape with Animals.' Rick Gekoski, The Guardian]]> 224 Cameron S. Redfern 1844084450 Esmeralda 3
That was an intriguing enough recommendation to get me interested.

Landscape with Animals is a short novel -- 200 pages of loosely-packed text. In those pages, a woman meets a (married) man, and they have sex many times over, until they break up. The end. Plot-wise, that is the entire book, uncondensed. So if this novel is going to earn its keep, there has to be something else to it besides story.

And since it has been described as erotic literature, the first place one might look for that something else is in the sex. Hm, well. To my eye, the sex wasn't that great. There was nothing especially interesting about this couple's coupling, nor about the way the sex was described. There's rather a lot of it, and while I didn't find it annoyingly repetitious, neither did I find it imaginative in its variety or entertaining in its descriptive flourishes.

So if not the story nor the sex… Interesting characters? Nope, not really. We don't get much sense of either character as a fully-rounded person. Our only insights into them come as they muse about random stuff: Heaven would have to be different for each of its inhabitants, she muses. A dog may not experience colors the way we do, he muses. And so on.

Last chance: Is the writing interesting? Is it artistic and creative enough to make the book worthwhile? This, to my thinking, is where the book comes closest to success. Hartnett's/Redfern's writing is stylish and at times truly creative and moving. The book really comes alive in the last 20 pages, when it describes the emotional state of the two protagonists (they share the book's attention about equally) after their breakup.

But all in all, I'd have to call this novel a failed attempt. A noble endeavor to do something different, something experimental and sexy, but one that doesn't really succeed.
]]> 3.47 2006
author: Cameron S. Redfern
name: Esmeralda
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2011/10/03
shelves:
review:
In a recent article in The Guardian, author Rick Gekoski rhetorically asks why there isn't a "good sex in fiction prize"; a counterpart to The Literary Review's Bad Sex in fiction award. In the course of the article, Gekoski writes knowledgeably of good, bad and indifferent writing about sex, and toward the end of the piece he says, "When I ask myself where I can find sustained high quality erotic writing, the best example that comes to mind is Sonya Hartnett's pseudonymous novel (as Cameron Redfern) Landscape with Animals, and not much else."

That was an intriguing enough recommendation to get me interested.

Landscape with Animals is a short novel -- 200 pages of loosely-packed text. In those pages, a woman meets a (married) man, and they have sex many times over, until they break up. The end. Plot-wise, that is the entire book, uncondensed. So if this novel is going to earn its keep, there has to be something else to it besides story.

And since it has been described as erotic literature, the first place one might look for that something else is in the sex. Hm, well. To my eye, the sex wasn't that great. There was nothing especially interesting about this couple's coupling, nor about the way the sex was described. There's rather a lot of it, and while I didn't find it annoyingly repetitious, neither did I find it imaginative in its variety or entertaining in its descriptive flourishes.

So if not the story nor the sex… Interesting characters? Nope, not really. We don't get much sense of either character as a fully-rounded person. Our only insights into them come as they muse about random stuff: Heaven would have to be different for each of its inhabitants, she muses. A dog may not experience colors the way we do, he muses. And so on.

Last chance: Is the writing interesting? Is it artistic and creative enough to make the book worthwhile? This, to my thinking, is where the book comes closest to success. Hartnett's/Redfern's writing is stylish and at times truly creative and moving. The book really comes alive in the last 20 pages, when it describes the emotional state of the two protagonists (they share the book's attention about equally) after their breakup.

But all in all, I'd have to call this novel a failed attempt. A noble endeavor to do something different, something experimental and sexy, but one that doesn't really succeed.

]]> 28220 The Fermata, which proves in the telling to be a very provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work.

Hilarious and totally original, Nicholson Baker's new novel is a triumphant comedy about sexual fantasy and fantastic sexuality.]]> 320 Nicholson Baker 0099466929 Esmeralda 5
As someone with an interest both in erotica/pornography (I write the stuff) and works of high literary aspiration (um, I read the stuff), I naturally felt I had to check this dude out.

I tried the Kindle sample-snippet of "House of Holes" first, but it didn't really grab me. It felt too easy, too facile and light-weight. As I read, a voice in the back of my head was muttering "yeah, yeah, some whacky surrealism, some explicit sex, more whacky surrealism, rinse and repeat. Ho-hum." Like the philistine looking at a Jackson Pollock, I kept thinking, "Whatsa big deal? *I* could do this."

Whether or not that leapt-to assessment of "House of Holes" was fair, I decided to try out "The Fermata," an earlier book of Baker's. The major draw of this novel for me was the delightfully sexy premise: A man has the ability to stop time, and uses his power to undress and ogle women. Yes, it's an old idea, but I thought it was potentially a terrific jumping-off point.

I was not disappointed. The main charm of the book is in the character of the protagonist. He's an immensely gentle, thoughtful man who takes great pains to avoid doing any harm or causing any distress with his magical power. The women he undresses, he meticulously re-dresses before restarting time, careful to leave behind no trace of his trespasses on their bodies. Furthermore, he's no mere seeker after nubile perfection. Instead he takes a boundless delight in the variations of women's bodies; "the average woman, the unexceptionable woman, the interestingly ugly woman…" In his delight, he waxes poetic for pages at a time over one woman's pubic hair ("to think I could have died and not seen this…"), the breasts of a host of others ("perfect in their indispensable imperfection"), and even such minutia as "the beautifully defined H shapes" at the backs of another woman's knees. He is intoxicated, transported and inspired by the physical beauty he unveils, by the secrets that women's uncovered bodies whisper to him.

Baker has said that he's a great admirer of John Updike, and it shows. The narrative is often intermixed with Updike-like musings on such peripheral topics as contact lenses versus eyeglasses or the experience of transcribing dictaphone tapes. But always (even more so than in Updike), these meditations are inspired and filtered through the protagonist's all-pervasive sexuality.

Speaking of sex… Yes, there's rather a lot of it. But since this is "literary pornography" (a term that in combination with Nicholson Baker's name returns 206 hits on Google), it's not the wall-to-wall sex you'll find in straightforward porn [cough[like mine]cough]. But the hot parts are definitely hot, and cover a generous range of kinks and variations.

Something of a standard line of description in reviews of erotica is "but there's a good story too." I'm spared from having to parrot that apologetic-sounding phrase here, because really there is no "story" to "The Fermata." There's no plot arc or character arc to speak of. Rather, it's more of a portrait -- a deftly and artistically rendered portrait of a delightful character and his magical gift.
]]> 3.67 1994
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Esmeralda
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2011/08/28
date added: 2011/08/28
shelves:
review:
Nicholson Baker has gotten a lot of attention with his latest book "House of Holes," with a host of highfalutin sources extolling its both its literary merit and its over-the-top eroticism. The New York Times, for example, calls it a “glorious filthfest,” and "as funny as it is filthy."

As someone with an interest both in erotica/pornography (I write the stuff) and works of high literary aspiration (um, I read the stuff), I naturally felt I had to check this dude out.

I tried the Kindle sample-snippet of "House of Holes" first, but it didn't really grab me. It felt too easy, too facile and light-weight. As I read, a voice in the back of my head was muttering "yeah, yeah, some whacky surrealism, some explicit sex, more whacky surrealism, rinse and repeat. Ho-hum." Like the philistine looking at a Jackson Pollock, I kept thinking, "Whatsa big deal? *I* could do this."

Whether or not that leapt-to assessment of "House of Holes" was fair, I decided to try out "The Fermata," an earlier book of Baker's. The major draw of this novel for me was the delightfully sexy premise: A man has the ability to stop time, and uses his power to undress and ogle women. Yes, it's an old idea, but I thought it was potentially a terrific jumping-off point.

I was not disappointed. The main charm of the book is in the character of the protagonist. He's an immensely gentle, thoughtful man who takes great pains to avoid doing any harm or causing any distress with his magical power. The women he undresses, he meticulously re-dresses before restarting time, careful to leave behind no trace of his trespasses on their bodies. Furthermore, he's no mere seeker after nubile perfection. Instead he takes a boundless delight in the variations of women's bodies; "the average woman, the unexceptionable woman, the interestingly ugly woman…" In his delight, he waxes poetic for pages at a time over one woman's pubic hair ("to think I could have died and not seen this…"), the breasts of a host of others ("perfect in their indispensable imperfection"), and even such minutia as "the beautifully defined H shapes" at the backs of another woman's knees. He is intoxicated, transported and inspired by the physical beauty he unveils, by the secrets that women's uncovered bodies whisper to him.

Baker has said that he's a great admirer of John Updike, and it shows. The narrative is often intermixed with Updike-like musings on such peripheral topics as contact lenses versus eyeglasses or the experience of transcribing dictaphone tapes. But always (even more so than in Updike), these meditations are inspired and filtered through the protagonist's all-pervasive sexuality.

Speaking of sex… Yes, there's rather a lot of it. But since this is "literary pornography" (a term that in combination with Nicholson Baker's name returns 206 hits on Google), it's not the wall-to-wall sex you'll find in straightforward porn [cough[like mine]cough]. But the hot parts are definitely hot, and cover a generous range of kinks and variations.

Something of a standard line of description in reviews of erotica is "but there's a good story too." I'm spared from having to parrot that apologetic-sounding phrase here, because really there is no "story" to "The Fermata." There's no plot arc or character arc to speak of. Rather, it's more of a portrait -- a deftly and artistically rendered portrait of a delightful character and his magical gift.

]]>