Somewhere between Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Fanny Hill is My Secret Life, an eleven volume, one million word memoir written by “Walter.” The entire text has been placed online and is searchable. Other interesting facts: The books were owned by Aleister Crowley, Harold Lloyd, and Josef von Sternberg. “Walter” was, in all likelihood, Henry Spencer Ashbee, who collected thousands of books in a London bachelor pad and left 1,600 volumes of erotica to the British Museum. On the sex and reading front, Ashbee seems to have found the best of both worlds. From Vol. 9, Chapter XIII:
We used at times to lay in bed reading baudy books. Then I would gamahuche her, and she liked the lingual exercise continued almost directly after her spend. A few minutes’ repose only and I’d fuck her, then we’d go on reading. Sometimes she’d read until suddenly she’d frig herself, laying back, grasping my prick hard with one hand, even hurting it sometimes, with eyes closed, more frequently looking me full in the face eyes wide open, with a wonderful voluptuous expression, till her breath shortened, her lovely thighs and belly quivered, then her eye lids drooped till her body was quite tranquil. � Then with the remark, � “We are beasts,” � our reading was resumed.
Related: Odd Books, “a home for the oddball and offbeat in literature,” which includes pages devoted to Frank Harris (another womanizer whose five-volume MY Life and Loves was published with several photographs), forgotten romantic writer Amanda McKittrick Ros (acclaimed by the likes of Twain, Lawrence, Huxley and Powell) and big-time crank Webster Edgerly, whose strange notions on health may have inspired to T.C. Boyle. Edgerly went by the psuedonym of “Dr. Everett Ralston.” By a twist of fate, today (January 4) is Ralston Day!
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (