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Did somebody already post the list for the benefit of people who don't want to visit playboy.com while at work?
1. Fanny Hill, John Cleland
2. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
3. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
4. The Story of O, Pauline Reage
5. Crash, J.G. Ballard
6. Interview With the Vampire, Anne Rice
7. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
8. The Magus, John Fowles
9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
10. Endless Love, Scott Spencer
11. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
12. Carrie's Story, Molly Weatherfield
13. Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
14. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious
15. Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille
16. The End of Alice, A.M. Homes
17. Vox, Nicholson Baker
18. Rapture, Susan Minot
19. Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews
20. In the Cut, Susanna Moore
21. Brass, Helen Walsh
22. Candy, Terry Southern
23. Forever, Judy Blume
24. An American Dream, Norman Mailer
25. The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins
And I think their choices are kinda mixed (with a lot of books that are important rather than sexy, and a very, uh, Playboy view of sexuality. Just one example--where the fuck's Rubyfruit Jungle?), but I've read... sixteen, most of them when I was younger than that.
I've read nine (possibly ten, I can never remember if I've read In The Cut, it must not have been very good) and will keep this list for future reference. Some I don't agree with (The Magus???), but I loves me some Susan Minot and most of all Nicholson Baker. I thought Fermatat was even sexier than Vox, though. His non-rot stuff is very enjoyable, too.
Many of those books aren't really that sexy at all. They're sort of about sex, as a theme, without being actually sexy, if you know what I mean. I've read nine of them, the classic-y ones, mostly. Vox was pretty good, yeah, but for sexy, I honestly think The Fermata is better. And how about Even Cowgirls get the Blues, or Jitterbug Perfume? Both have some fun and funny one-handed passages...
Anyway, it's so hard to handle sex properly in literature without veering off into cringworthy cheese. High-minded themes and realistic sex don't mix easily except in very good hands. So I prefer it when they're mostly separate -- that's what trashy erotica is for.
As is usually the case with lists like this, I might like their choices better if they explained, precisely, just what basis they were judging the books on. Quite a few of those books are, for example, important historically (often for reasons related to censorship), but not very, y'know, hot. Maybe it's just me, though.
box, it looks to me like they are books, not pure erotica or short stories, so maybe that was the implied criteria - ideas, significance, etc, rather than the strict hotness. I dunno. I'm always looking for things to add to my library list, so I'm thrilled to have the list. I can buy the Hot stuff at the bookstore. Oooh, I love Winterson too, matildaben. More for the style than the hotness, though.
I guess I just meant stuff you could get at the library. I didn't mean they were all good books, I just meant they had aspirations other than erotic ones. (Never read Peyton Place)
I've never made it thru a Winterson book though people keep giving them to me.
Spencer's Endless Love is one of my favorite books and I was happy to see it on the list as it's not a very popular book since that shitass movie came out. Roth is my favorite author so nice to see him there, bu Portnoy's in not very sexy, imo--though the line they quoted about the "educated cunt" is awesome.
matildaben, yeah, I dunno why she turns me off so. Snoozeville or something. Same with that Susan Minot book. Back when I was doing victoryshag I used to have a po box and three different readers sent me Written on the Body saying vs reminded them of it. Grrr. :)
My father had a stack of porno-paperbacks in his nightstand. I used to sneakread them and, well, you know. There was this one about this girl in a barn with a wolf... pretty weird stuff. Not exactly "Literature," though. They were gone after he died; guess my mom cleared them out. I always wondered if she knew about them; she's a rather prim lady (this is my adopted mom, not my birth mom; my birth mom was anything but prim).
Palahniuk's Choke should be there, though. Brilliant and twisted. And Bukowski's Women.
Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, I think, belongs (more for importance than quality), as does the aforementioned Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown, who, these days, mostly writes cozy mysteries with cats in them.
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