Bite Me, Tony

Lady Chatterley's Lover  First published in 1928, D. H. Lawrence's scandalous  Lady Chatterley's Lover  has been in the  to-read stack next to our bed for the better part of a year. I've been meaning to get to it, but my attention kept getting diverted to less, ummm, high-minded efforts like endlessly doom scrolling and immersing myself in online puzzles. It was only last week that I broke loose from the hamster wheel of dubious technology and picked up poor Lady Chatterley, who had spent far too many months languishing in the limbo of tsundoku*.   Since the book is almost 100 years old, I half-expected to be put off by a brain overload of stilted verbosity and/or content that was neither as relevant nor as salacious as it once was. Boy, was I wrong.  Lady Chatterley's Lover is, in many ways, a very modern novel. By reputation,   the book is considered to be an erotic classic but there's so much more to it than that. D. H. Lawrence--through ...

Pillion In the past few weeks, we have communed in the forest with Shakespeare's tortured wife and unleashed the beasts of Emily Bronte's favorite fuck me / fuck you couple. Today, I decided to fast-forward to present-day London, specifically the suburb of Bromley, where the protagonist of  Pillion , sadsack Colin, hands out parking tickets and sings with a local barbershop quartet. Though  thirtyish  and single, Colin still lives with his parents: not a good look for a young man looking for love (or some close facsimile thereof). Virtually friendless, Colin's social life is nil through no fault of his mum, who is determined to hook her son up with a new boyfriend if it's the last thing she ever does. And that may well be the case since the poor woman is dying of cancer. However, her quest is not so simple, given that Colin doesn't seem terribly appreciative of her efforts. All this is compounded by the fact that Colin is rather plain , a fact that is borne out b...