Dawn's Reading Blog

I’m a big fan of Dan Savage’s sex adivce column, so when I came across Savage Love: Straight Answers from America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist , I thought I’d get a kick out of it. It’s entertaining but it’s, at this point, an old book. His style and advice have come a long way and certain riffs like DTMFA don’t appear in this collection. So it was fun but I’d like to see the next 10 years (perhaps soon?).

So this woman decides to place a personal ad (in the New York Book Review – a far cry from Craig’s List) saying she wants to have sex and A Round-Heeled Woman is the result. It doesn’t go so well. I could have told her that. Although it goes better for her than it did for me. Perhaps that’s the advantage of reaching a New York Book Review kind of audience.

It was an entertaining book and you couldn’t help but feel for her, even while appreciating her journey and hoping she meets her goal and knowing she won’t. I do wish there’d been more of that story and less of her backstory. I found her life in general less interesting than her current mission.

The Pleasure’s All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive is a lot less titillating than you’d expect. No steamy sex scenes here. In fact the BDSM scene is a lot sexier in stories on the internet than it apparently is in real life. People have some very strange fetishes. Joan writes well and it’s an interesting, though not arousing, read.

I bought The New Sensual Massage to give someone a massage after a tough race they were participating in. I read it prior to the race and it gave me some ideas, but you’d need to read it through several times to retain even close to all of it. It’s not like you can realistically refer to it while the massage is going on.

The recipient seemed to enjoy the massage but I’m not positive it was any better than the general rubbing and kneading we all know how to do without a book. I don’t know that there was anything particularly “sensual” about it either except that the models in the book are nude.

If I had it to buy again, I’d get the DVD. It’s hard to understand some of these concepts from a description and a still photo.

When I decided to read the 100 Best, I discovered that I already owned Tropic of Cancer because it had come as part of a four book set of “classic porn” that I’d picked up at some point. Tropic of Cancer is really bad porn.

When I first started reading it, I thought it was bad period. But it grew on me. In fact, now that it’s done I find myself wanting to pick it up and read more which is usually the sign of a really good book, although I don’t think I liked it that much.

It’s the story of a young man, the author himself I suppose, bumming around in Paris and mostly worrying about how he’s going to eat. There are some chapters that are hugely entertaining snapshots of his fellow ex-pats. Then there are others that are almost nonsensical stream of conciousness (and a not-very-sober concious at that) which is how the book started which is why it was so painful to read in the beginning.

The other problem with the book is that it contains a lot of inside references to Paris sights and establishments and even events and people of the day. These aren’t references to the classics or Greek mythology which we might be expected to know. They’re mostly things that only someone living in Paris under his circumstances would know. I felt I could have gotten more out of some passages if I’d know what he was referring to.