Dirty, Happy Book Reviews (and some relationship-y stuff too)

If my toddler walks up to someone, chances are he either has a book or a tractor in his hands. (Or the recycling, but the previous sounds better.) He gets that from me. All the family remembers my childhood as including either farm sets or books. One of the reasons now that my partner and I get along so well is that he likes my livestock and doesn’t give me a hard time about my books. (Granted, he doesn’t know the full extent of my collection either, but either way, I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker.)

Simply put, books make me happy. Reading makes me happy. Reviewing books makes me happy. And when we get to do what makes us happy as individuals, we’re happier as a couple. So this week I’m going to share with you lovely readers the books that make me happy.

A lot of books make me happy. (Feel free to make that as dirty as you want in your head, I don’t mind :) It made the most sense to break this project down by genre, though it will remain in the realm of erotica, since this is (mostly) an erotica blog. This week will begin with literary erotica, and then we’ll see where it goes.

So, (drumroll please……) book of the day is: With My Body by Nikki Gemmell.

(Caution: Spoiler Alert)

The premise of this story is a smothered wife and mum reflects back on a particular summer from her girlhood, where she learned about sex from a somewhat eccentric writer. The affair has continued to haunt her into her marriage and approaching middle age. There was no resolution to the affair and no man has measured up to the memory since.

It got to the point with this book that I couldn’t stop reading. It’s exactly the kind of literary prose that I love, with a great deal of the erotic thrown in. The second person narrative can be distracting at times, but it’s more like listening to how you talk to yourself. The author slips you into the narrator’s skin, and you feel her claustrophobia from her family, her angst-ridden teenage desires, her empowerment by the end.

While beautifully written, this is also a disturbing book, in the way that Lolita is disturbing. Some reviews have criticized this book as exploiting the female character, but I wonder if they would say Anais Nin exploited O as well. The exploitation bothered me less in this book than the miscarriage at the end. Though, I have to admit, that part hit home on a raw, personal level.

But overall, this is a wonderful novel, and a wonderful story of a couple finding one another again. Because sometimes the love of your youth isn’t the person you end up with. And the lesson here is that that is okay too.