Too funny for words
Posted by: Vanessa on: March 16, 2012
Excuse Me Where Is The Exit? by Stella Deleuze
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Life is a lot funnier than a TV sitcom. It’s all a question of attitude.
Stella Deleuze has oodles of attitude.
Take her little piece on cycling. Cyclists are a pest. Cyclists ignore traffic lights. Cyclists hiss at you and speed up in situations where motorists would brake. Cyclists don’t have brakes. They have SOMETHING TO PROVE. German cyclists are the worst because they always have the right of way, even on the pavement, and especially on the piece of pavement that you happen, in your ignorance, to have strayed onto just before they hurtle into you at 25 miles per hour from behind.
Stella is a German cyclist but does this bother her? Not at all.
“Pedestrians are worse than tanks,” she writes.
But she is also lovely. Because Stella doesn’t behave like a cyclist. She behaves like a human being.
She uses the brakes for the bloody idiots. She actually stops at traffic lights. She admits her failings. When she is nearly killed by a bus it is, of course, her fault. When a confused Frenchman stumbles out of a taxi straight into her path, she forgives him. “He’ll have the bruises after all,” she concedes.
Which is why you can’t stop laughing.
But humour is a personal thing so I gave this book the acid test. I read some of it aloud to my flatmate.
Howls of laughter.
Kindle stolen again while I was out.
It’s really hard to find a book that makes you split your sides laughing. Especially when you share it with someone. Keep this one to yourself. Don’t read it in public. And don’t read it out loud.
I have a little list… I have a little list
Posted by: Vanessa on: March 7, 2012
Carnal Machines: Steampunk Erotica by D.L. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this anthology there are two stories that include smart, sexy Chinese women, and I like it for that reason alone. There are 14 stories altogether, which is quite a generous number. It’s surprising, then, that they are of a consistently high quality. I did skip one of the stories, I must admit, and I suppose if I were being a conscientious reviewer I’d say which one it was, but it was no big deal, I just didn’t like it. It’s an anthology. It’s okay to skip around.
Talking of skipping around, I first saw this as a paperback in a bookshop in Charing Cross Road and I nearly bought it but I was with a male friend and I didn’t want him to feel threatened by my interest in sex machines.
So I bought a Kindle version. I really wish I’d bought the paperback. An anthology like this shows up the weaknesses of the Kindle. I kept wanting to flick through and dip in and out and I really couldn’t.
The only author I’d heard of before I bought the book was Janine Ashbless. All the others were not only new to me but have really strange names like Elias A. St. James, Essemoh Teepee and Blue Poe Von Page. Unfortunately the Kindle version doesn’t give the author’s name with the story title in the table of contents, so this made it really hard to get familiar with their names and remember who had written what. To make matters worse, the author biographies at the back are in a different order from the stories and don’t give the story titles.
I had to write my own table of contents in the end, which is really geeky, isn’t it? But I suppose someone who can do that would also appreciate a steam-powered anal probe, so you could say this book and I were made for each other.
Like my review, this book should not be taken too seriously. But as a piece of fun, it’s really very stylish indeed.
I was pleasantly impressed by the imagination and the craftsmanship that went into the stories. One story impressed me particularly. It was Lair of the Red Countess by Kathleen Bradean. The writing has a sensuous surface texture and shadowy depths that really got my attention. It isn’t perfect. It is a bit rough in places. But I like its roughness and I like the deft narrative shifts that delve into the backgrounds of both main characters and flesh them out for us. It’s quite a complex little story for all its playfulness, and there is a lot of flesh, as it were, packed into a very tight space.
But the other stories are also very well done and the theme of Carnal Machines is carried through them all with admirable panache. Now that I have my little home-made table of contents, I will definitely use it to look up some of the other writers on my list.
Teetering on the edge of a precipice
Posted by: Vanessa on: March 7, 2012
- In: Hot Stuff
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The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t know what made me buy this book and start reading it. The first few pages were torture. I knew the novel was unfinished. At least it would be short. But why even bother at all?
Then gradually there appeared light in the murk. Uncle and nephew, Jack and Eddy, got out their nuts and started to talk about Pussy.
No one does dialogue like Dickens. It is crisp, clear, entertaining and lifelike. Even the way the men crack their nuts adds to the drama.
Dickens is completely unafraid of sentiment. He allows the two men to be as affectionate with each other as two lovers.
When Pussy comes into the story it gets even better. Everyone is in love with her. It’s sickening but it’s also exciting. I love this kind of melodrama.
The way John Jasper stares at Pussy when she is playing the piano is fantastic. You remember it throughout all that follows and so does she. She especially remembers it many months later in Chapter 19 when John/Jack is staring at her again, dressed in mourning for the missing Eddy.
At times Dickens can be so verbose that it’s hard to catch his meaning but when he is describing passion his sentences are models of clarity. This chapter is called Shadow in the Sundial and the image, like so much that Dickens writes, sticks forever in your mind:
This time he does not touch her. But his face looks so wicked and menacing, as he stands leaning against the sundial – setting, as it were, his black mark upon the very face of day – that her flight is arrested by horror as she looks at him.
What makes Dickens’s writing so thrilling is that he captures the passion of the moment in the very rhythm of his sentences. He isn’t afraid of dramatic gestures.
“There is my fidelity to my dear boy after death. Tread upon it!”
With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something precious.
“There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you. Spurn it!”
With a similar action.
“There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six toiling months. Crush them!”
The scene builds and builds like a symphonic poem till Pussy rushes away to her room and faints half way up the stairs.
There is a masterful touch at the end:
A thunderstorm is coming on, the maids say, and the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear; no wonder; they have felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.
My knees were also all of a tremble and my heart all of a flutter while I read, and read, and read.
Two semi-colons in a single sentence, by the way! There is a man who is not afraid to flout convention.
The ending is, of course, abrupt and dizzying. It leaves you tottering on the edge of a precipice. My imagination was teeming with possibilities. I read a few theories about how the story might have been meant to go on but I wasn’t satisfied by any of them. I couldn’t help feeling that Dickens’s imagination was just too ingenious, too inventive and too mischievous to be second-guessed by even the most creative of scholars.
So for stimulating my imagination, this was the best book by far that I have read this year.
Get it free!
Posted by: Vanessa on: March 3, 2012
- In: Hot Stuff
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As part of a special promotion for all ebooks distributed through Smashwords, I am giving you the chance to get a FREE copy of my sensational erotic memoir Love Has No Limits.
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Brutal gang rape missed by Paypal’s censors
Posted by: Vanessa on: March 3, 2012
Justine by Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book offers an excellent lesson in how to escape censorship but is otherwise rather dull.
For those of you who don’t know, Paypal is currently trying to clean up the internet by refusing to do business with any site that offers for sale works of a lewd and depraved nature (as defined by Paypal.) Justine is one of the dirtiest, most depraved, most wicked books you will ever come across but has nevertheless managed to elude Paypal’s obsessive team of censors by adopting the following ingenious ploys.
1. The author has chosen for a pen-name something that sounds vaguely aristocratic. Americans revere titles. For the Marquis de Sade, they are a matter of contempt (“forged by the impertinence that seeks, and sustained by the credulity that bestows them.”)
2. The novel is disguised as a work of philosophical literature. You can depict any act, no matter how bestial or disgusting, so long as your tale has a scholarly imprint. On the back of my paperback copy of this book the label “Literature” is stamped in the top-left and in the bottom-right corners, where even the most stupid of censors can’t miss it.
3. It is written in French. Most Americans can’t understand French and those who can know that French, being the language of love and having been kept implicitly pure down the centuries by the French Academy appointed for that purpose, permits everything. That said, my scholarly translation was produced in America by American scholars. It is always a good idea to enlist the aid of scholars in editing your work if you can because most of them are sexually repressed and therefore see nearly any kinky fantasy as normal.
4. The author employs circumlocution. Okay, this ruse can backfire but it keeps all but the most intelligent of readers off your back. (And censors, by definition are not intelligent readers.) So, for example, when Justine is stripped naked and softened up prior to being gang-raped by four hardened criminals, the author finds ingenious ways to stimulate the imagination by using language that is deliberately imprecise:
“… as soon as I was as he [one of the gang members] desired me to be, [i.e. naked] having made me crouch down on all fours so that I resembled a beast, Dubois [the female gang leader] took in hand a very monstrous object and led it to the peristyles of first one and then the other of Nature’s altars, and under her guidance the blows it delivered to me here and there were like those of a battering ram thundering at the gates of a besieged town in the olden days.”
This pretty simile, by the way, reminds me of one of my favourite Chinese books, Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu. The title is based on a French proverb:
Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.
There is much more to be said about this extraordinary novel but as it is nearly all of an intellectual and moralistic nature I suspect it will have little interest for my friends, acquaintances and readers, so, with a heavy heart, I will give this book two stars for effort and move on.
Be a hero, take drugs and seduce your cousin
Posted by: Vanessa on: March 1, 2012
Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is very good. The first time I read it I didn’t appreciate it. It seemed too simplistic. The characterisation seemed too stark. He was going for the easy options, I thought. The big themes. Hyperbole. Hyperdrama.
Then I read a whole lot of fantasy and science fiction novels.
In the meantime Michael Moorcock’s prose has improved. His insights have deepened. His characterisation has become more subtle. His descriptive powers have been strengthened and his tastes have become more refined.
When I got to the end this time I wanted to start again from the beginning.
I didn’t, of course, because I have shelfloads of books to review. Erotica to write. A blog to maintain.
I can see how this has influenced other writers. Perhaps it will influence me.
It probably already has.
I may not embrace the incestuous theme but I will definitely be getting more, more, more Moorcock.
Beyond all limits?
Posted by: Vanessa on: February 25, 2012
- In: Hot Stuff
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Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair by Elizabeth McNeill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have to give this book 5 stars because I enjoyed it and, while I was reading it, I became very interested in the life of the author.
But, to be honest, I spent more time trying to find out something about the author than I did actually reading the book. It’s a very short book. I like the flow of the sentences. They are colloquial and simple but very smooth, which is the sign, I think, of a very experienced writer.
I didn’t find out very much about Elizabeth McNeill for all the time I spent researching her. I gathered that at the time of writing this novel she was working as an executive for a New York Publishing company, that the book was probably inspired by a real relationship and that she probably shopped at Bloomingdale’s.
I didn’t find the sex in this book arousing but I enjoyed the descriptions of clothes and of the insides of bedrooms and wardrobes.
What I liked most, though, was the cool, thoughtful analysis of why she enjoyed pain during sex, how it contributed to her sensual pleasure and why it intensified her orgasms.
The story moves between present and past tense very skilfully and there is a poignancy throughout that culminates quite beautifully.
At the end of the story she references a “porn flick” called Beyond all limits and she talks about having gone beyond her limits.
I found this interesting because of my own erotic memoir called Love has no limits. Elizabeth McNeill has a different perspective from me. She ends on a note of pessimism: “I wonder whether my body will ever again register above luke-warm.”
My own book ends on a note of naive yearning: “… love has no limits if it deserves the name of love.”
Perhaps that’s why, although I enjoyed this book intellectually, emotionally it left me cold.
Twisting my knickers off
Posted by: Vanessa on: February 10, 2012
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Sexy Briefs: Knickers in a Twist edited by Tessie L’Amour
This is a dirty, sexy little book that had me slavering with senseless lust. Need I say any more?
Oh, all right, most of you probably know by now that try as I might to appear like a girl from the gutter, I’m really a cultivated acolyte of Erato, the muse of sensual poetry; no book holds my attention for long unless it has a smattering of literary merit. There are eight stories in this collection, which is part two of a very dirty duo. I skipped part one to get to the daringly poetic Dream a Little Dream by Sessha Batto. Sombrely sexy, it flirts with darkness and alludes to deathly themes in a language that is alive and sensual.
Then I doubled back for a scintillating sci-fi snippet from telepathic Cecilia Tan. Later I savoured the paradoxes of Sharazade and the Shakespearian sexual shenanigans of Tessie L’Amour.
But don’t worry, this collection shouldn’t tax your literary faculties too much. The stories are very short and the direct assault on your senses offered by Nobilis Reed, Summer Daniels, Nan Allen and Ayoub Khote should allow you to switch off your higher brain and tune into your primal priorities without further ado.
Tinkering with the Conan Doyle canon
Posted by: Vanessa on: February 8, 2012
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by John Joseph Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I wasn’t expecting much of The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, to be honest. I listened to a quite well written introduction by, I presume, John Joseph Adams, which was read by someone who insisted on pronouncing Moriarty as Moriarity about fifteen times, which didn’t bode well.
But the stories themselves were surprisingly good. I haven’t listened to them all yet but I really look forward to them and most of the time I’m not disappointed. I like listening in the dark. Some of them are very spooky. They are also witty in a way, playing upon our expectations. They’ve all been published before in some form so they have a pedigree. There are some great writers here and some Victoriana specialists, so the standard is generally very high.
So if you like Sherlock Holmes (I love him!) and you’re open-minded, give it a try. The stories are a little improbable but that’s why they’re fun. Even die-hard fans of Sir Arthur (I’m one!) won’t be disappointed by these re-workings of the famous Conan Doyle canon.
(Everyone who reviews this book has to mention the Conan Doyle canon.)
Farewell My Concubine
Posted by: Vanessa on: February 3, 2012
- In: Tepid
- 2 Comments
Farewell My Concubine by Lilian Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a poignant, short novella that lasts just over 3 hours in the unabridged version I listened to.
The bare bones of the story form a very potent plot but the narrative is somewhat dry. Since it spans over 50 years and the lives of the main characters are set against the turbulent political changes in China in that period, from the Japanese invasion, through the rise of Mao Zedong to the end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong, it is hard for the author to squeeze in the telling personal details that touch your heart.
Consequently, I was not drawn into the drama of the characters’ lives; their emotions were at one remove.
You only have to glance at the stills from the movie to see how much more powerful it is. It has more colour, more life, more emotion. The actors’ faces make you want to cry.
The narrator of the audio book is a famous Hollywood actress, Nancy Kwan, but her pronunciation of the Chinese names was so mangled and so inconsistent that I sometimes wasn’t sure who she was talking about. Never mind. The real Chinese diaspora has only just started. Give it a few more years and everybody in the world will be speaking fluent Mandarin, even our lovely friends from Hong Kong.
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