Since we are somewhat time-challenged at the moment, we’ve decided to embark on an ill-advised idea that calls for your participation.
Return of the Reluctant hopes to shake up these pristine pages with the First Annual Naughty Reading Photo Contest.
What we would like our readers to do is send us your visual approximation of what naughty reading is. Naughty readers do not have to be exclusively female. To keep this thing equal opportunity (and desirable for any and all sexual persuasions), we want naughty male readers too. Send your entries in JPEG form to ed AT edrants.com before August 31, 2005. (Filesize should be no more than 60K per entry. Anything over that will be disqualified.) Photos are limited to one per participant. So do send us your best photo. We will post the photos (along with designated credit, if desired) as they come in and eventually establish them on a separate page.
So that there is some incentive for this thing, the winner will receive a Powell’s $20 Gift Card.
From here, we will announce three finalists which you, the readers, can vote on.
So have at it, naughty book lovers, academics and librarians alike! Show the world right now that reading is sexy and salacious!
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. (