Still Veiled Allusions

Attempting to be international on this quest for love, so after finishing one set in Ireland, I ventured to Arabia and The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi. Very much like Marguerite Duras' The Lover (in fact, Al Neimi even cites her influence), this short novella takes place primarily in the mind of the author, or as her recollections. As an emigre to Paris studying Arabic erotica, Al Neimi's character lauds the lustiness found centuries ago in a pre-fundamentalist Muslim literature. She lives her own lusty life modeled on these old premises but she never fully lifts her veil and all her tales of couplings are intellectually rather than physically tantalizing.

While she is almost Lenny Bruce like in getting the "forbidden" words down in print, they are lifeless, not to mention loveless. In fact, Al Neimi, sounds also like Tina Turner: "What's love got to do with it?" She replays the conversations she has both with male co-workers and female exiles. The former group refers to sexual conquests in jokes; the latter, as gossip, never personal disclosures. Although the female character purports to have had numerous affairs, she divides her experiences into BT and AT, the T being the main male figure, the Thinker, again emphasizing that sex is an intellectual pursuit, notwithstanding the physical benefits the classic Arabic authors describe.

Another short, short book, taking as long to read as yesterday's pedicure and hair styling at the spa. And almost the equivalent of those racy magazines I remember seeing at my father's barber shop: somewhat titillating but neither informative nor romantic.

Four Star Book: A Happy Marriage

Like the other four star book so far this year, The Last Time They Met, Rafael Yglesias employs a structure to tell his tale of alternating chapters between when this couple first me and the end of their marriage. The first chapter is hilarious: Enrique (Rafael's transparent alter ego) is all of 21, living in the Village pre-gentrification in the mid-70s. He is a high school drop out. No, no, no. Don't expect a story of failure here; he dropped out to publish his first book at 16 and by 21 is awaiting the publication of his third novel. His friend introduces him to Margaret, a recent Cornell graduate, three years older than Enrique. It is love at first sight but his friend says she is clearly out of his league. Enrique feels doomed by his perceived inadequacies, mostly his lack of formal education and Ivy League polish.

The second chapter immediately changes tone from this lightness as Margaret is dying on the private floor of Sloan Kettering. (Knocking me for an additional loop, a good friend of mine from work was at Sloan Kettering the day I read this chapter.) Yglesias has immediately captivated his readers, creating a "need to know" -- how did their awkward first meeting bloom into marriage, what happened during the thirty intervening years. The poignancy of Margs suffering and fast decline is steadied with recollections from their marriage, warts and all. The all including a rebellious second son, controlling in-laws, Enrique's affair with one of her best friends, couple counseling, psychoanalysis, and plenty of career struggles.

All the characters are multidimensional, but it is the maturing and coming to fully understand the idiosyncrasies, role models and motives of each other that marks this book as more inviting and revealing than say Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, that now seems to me too self-centered and aloof.

I dog-eared so many corners that the book bulges at the top. If I tried to select my favorite quotes, this review would run on forever. After all the "artistic" (read small publication run) of his novels and the "sell out" of his talents to Hollywood screenwriting, it is ironic that Yglesias' first award winning book is this one. Yet it does not leave the reader with any feeling that he is profiting on his wife's death; it is his catharsis, his love song, with lyrics that strike everyone's heart.

As Long as It Takes to Read 212 Pages

This short novella by William Trevor, Love and Summer, is something to read for a sense of place, Rathmoye, Ireland, rather than for an erotic romp, because the "affair" between Ellie and Florian doesn't seem to last a summer, but only as long as it takes to read the book. Ellie is a foundling, sent by the nuns to be a housekeeper to a widowed farmer. She eventually marries Dillahan and settles into her place in the small, isolated village, selling eggs and buttermilk and pedaling her bicycle down country lanes.

The town is so sparsely populated and everyone more or less content in their own sphere that a stranger draws attention when he photographs the funeral of one of the leading citizens, the owner of the inn and pub. Florian is merely idling until he emigrates after selling off his parents estate house, dabbling in photography because he does not possess the artistic talents or brio of his father and Italian mother, and pining for his first love cousin Isabella. Ellie's attraction to him seems more a teenage curiosity, a need to experience a fuller array of masculinity given her cloistered upbringing. Trevor is a master in succinctly conveying this innocence, saying Ellie had never seen a man shave.

Knowing the town has eyes and ears, they manage to see each other only in nearby but remote tourist tea rooms and amongst the "ruins." Florian never regards Ellie as more than a dalliance; Ellie imagines she would leave Ireland with him, going as far as buying a case for her bicycle to carry her meager possessions.

There is a similar theme as that found in The Reliable Wife: a widower who feels himself guiltily marked by his community, penitent and so intent on beginning a new marriage that he will not imagine the consequences of the rambling tale of the town's "mad man."

The denouement is quiet, emphasizing the worth of a community that is contained, comfortable and consoling. Trevor concludes from such stability comes strength, never sensuality.

Another Anita Shreve: Not Where or When but Why

Because I liked The Last Time They Met so much, almost grabbing strangers in the elevator and telling them to read it, I thought I'd dig deeper into her work and hope to find another love/lust story. And so, the brief description of Where or When sounded like it would also align perfectly with the 2011 blog theme and Paz standards for great love stories. Not.

As I have found with many authors, they have their own themes, their own experiences that they massage again and again in their plots, almost becoming their own self-administered psychoanalysis to make sense of their recollected lives. Shreve again presents two lovers who met as teenagers (here at fourteen as opposed to senior year in high school in TLTTM), and who knew each other only briefly, a mere week in Catholic summer camp with all that attendant structure and chaperon. Both marry, have children, and encounter life's inevitable tragedies. And again, Shreve has the woman be a poet, traveled to Africa. Where to draw the autobiographical line?

Charles sees Sean's (my converted spelling from the Welsh) picture in the Globe's Sunday literary magazine when her latest book of poems is reviewed. (The novel was written in 1993 which explains the lack of the resources of Facebook, etc.). His business is failing as is the entire blue collar fishing town to whom he sells life insurance; he is heading towards foreclosure and repossession land. Sean's husband is also having hard times: crops have failed two years in a row at his onion farm in Pennsylvania. Both marriages are down-turned.

He writes her, reminiscing on innocent first love, with the trite queries about the last 35 years. This is a love story so the inevitable happens, conveniently at their old camp site which has been turned into a quaint inn. The comment in my review of TLTTM, making lustful love dependent on a lengthy separation, is expressed beautifully here as well (if in somewhat a more shallow affair): "...eros is linked with time. It is in the very urgency of time, the sense their minutes together are short and numbered, that he must say what he has come to say before she leaves, that gestures and words cannot be wasted. But it is, paradoxically, also in the vast expanse of the lost years -- the keen sense, whenever he is with her, of all the days and hours missed, the youthful bodies not known, the thousands of nights he might have touched her easily, without loss, without guilt and anxiety ... he thinks of their hours together as time stolen or salvaged -- time-outs from their separate realities."

But it is these realities that Shreve seems to tilt to in this story. Two parallel threads direct this affair towards being, not ill-fated like TLTTM, but false. They hardly knew each other, except for teenage raging hormones. Neither has a hint of what the other is like when facing difficulties too many ages have passed. One of Shreve's best lines has Sean realizing her periods had not even started when she met Charles and now she is going through menopause. Even more poignant, emphasizing both Charles' and Sean's "real" lives are the descriptions of how both families celebrate Christmas. On balance, those years appear to outweigh their reunion season.

The story anticipates the abrupt, tragic ending in TLTTM, but here it seems forced and mundane: their spouses learn of the affair; Sean's husband shoots himself; Charles has a car accident. The ending seems as adolescent as the first encounter.

Writing is to Wording as Lusting is to Sexing

Jane Vandenburgh's novel The Physics of Sunset is as difficult to read as physics itself. It is a horribly pretentious book, set in Berkeley, populated with architects, poets, artists and European exiles, and casually referring to the California normalcy of earthquakes, floods and fires. She peppers it with references to "everyone" reading Hawkins' Brief History of Time as cocktail party conversation. All these pieces fracture the whole of the story. If it is to be a woman's view of sex, as seems to be a major plot line for Vandenburgh, the reader has to plow through 190 pages of this drivel to get there. And the sex is awful. Anna and Alec are both bored with not just their marriages but their existence and lack of professional success. Alec has his Queens/Jewish angst; Anna, her horsey Yankee stock, her inability to manage a household or child, and her poetic aloofness. After reading Sonya Friedman's theories, both Anna and Alec seem to be replicating the mating rituals, or lack thereof, of their parents.

Vandenburgh's writing style is impermeable. To hoist her on her own petard, here's a quote that refers to Alec's wife but just as accurately describes the author's lack of clarity or careful plot: "... didn't talk so much as she did what he thought of as wording, an accelerated intellectualized babble about artistic theory (or science or society or love -- my edit) and its practice that caught the listener up in a lurching and chaotic logic." And again, Alec towards the end of their "affair" opines: "Words were junk, as infinite as stars, and they were being uttered and said and written that very moment, tapped in, put out, sent, going out into the ether that was either nowhere or was the porno chat room where the lid was completely off but no actual intimacy of the mouth-to-mouth or skin-on-skin would ever transpire." Well here you have an idea about how Vandeburgh writes about Californication as well.

Although written in 1999, the book felt me feeling like I had just finished a marathon of Internet searching, occasionally finding an interesting tidbit about famous person, a facet of the universe, or a recipe from Chez Panisse. But it was equally random as a trip down a rabbit hole. Also, hardly passionately, lovingly lustful.

How Did I End Up With This Book? Remind Me

Ah, it was because it liked the Tesla story. Had trouble recalling who Samantha Hunt was, especially since this novel is nothing like The Invention of Everything Else and it certainly does not belong on a lust list, despite it's fantasies of lost loves. It belongs more rightly on the 2009 list of places, as does The Reliable Wife, the book club selection for January. Both of these books have a theme of "this place is driving me crazy."

The Seas takes place in remote northern coastal Maine. It is sort of like Shipping News in that it is set in a small fishing community where everyone knows everyone else and there basically is nothing to do. The poverty spawns alcoholism and insanity. The same family-based and almost inherited insanity that is the backdrop of The Reliable Wife and the citizens of Truitt, Wisconsin, isolated in a never-ending winter landscape.

In both there is a whisper of longed for abandoned love. In Maine, the author writes more Gothically and the nineteen year old heroine has probably lost her grip of reality for over a decade. Truitt in Wisconsin is more of a Shakespearean character -- doomed by the damnation of a religious fanatic mother, an adulterous wife and a community that blames him for his loses and loneliness. Maybe I just prefer the reality of the mid-West story to the dream like flow of the coastal Maine one. The "villains" are easier to hate; and redemption always trumps despair.

So tonight, in the never ending cold and snow and freezing rain of the Northeast, I will try to find a more lusty tale to warm my bones and spirit. Despite hearty soup, the weather feels like Ramadan or Lent, imposing a withdrawal from society that aligns too closely with these last two books. I need racing blood.

Did These Two Women Ever Talk

Hot on the heels of my finishing Tempted Women by Botwin, I quickly read another pop psych book, Secret Loves by Sonya Friedman, also written in the early 90s. Friedman is 180 degrees turned from Botwin, finding her subject in married women with long term, relatively successful affairs. Unlike Botwin's world where the women are tempted by bosses and fellow workers, the women in Friedman's book find love sometimes at work, but just as often when returning to college or even in a grocery store aisle.

Her theme is that these women find what their marriage lacks in their lovers, but at the same time, so focused on the financial and cultural states of their families that do not plan to divorce. (Well, maybe the lesbians do, statistical outlyers that they are.)

In contrast to straying husbands who seduce single women, Friedman finds these long term affairs are most often with married men who are equally adverse to breaking up their families.

So where does she come down? Being so very modern and liberal, she does not condemn such women, after all the evidence of their happiness and fulfillment is almost overwhelming, but she wraps up by saying these women should pass on to their daughters the advice to "know thyself" first so that they don't marry in haste and find their emotional lives lacking. How Pollyana.

Once again since I finished most of the book last night, and also finished The Reliable Wife, which suprisingly for a book club book was actually very well written and captivating, almost Shakespearean in its tragedies and passions. So my mind wandered into the celestial heavens, thinking of the alignment of the sun, moon and earth and using eclipses as a metaphor for human loves. The earth is convention, societal morals, and rootedness. It gets in the way periodically of the other two attractions in the sky. The sun is regularity and productivity. The moon, on the other hand, calls to us in the darkness, waxing and waning and luring us with its mystery. When the earth blocks out the sun, it creates almost a black hole of nothingness; but in a full lunar eclipse, like the one earlier this winter, the moon turns passionate blood red. The sun is a woman's spouse, the moon her lover. Who is Friedman to say one is better than the other, one optional.

The Book is Not Tempting

Having such difficulty finding novels, I succumbed to listing a couple of nonfictions on the 2011 blog list for lust. One from this niche is Tempted Women by Carol Botwin, a book I found way, way too pop psych for my tastes. Written in 1994 by a "sexologist" from NYC, it already seems terribly dated. Botwin extrapolates the reasons for American women straying from their marriages in the main from letters. Most of these women end up having affairs with co-workers, more often than not bosses. The perspective seems to be a lagging view of the perils of the economically emanicipated female, reminding me almost of those big game "farms" taking the place of African safaris and making it so much easier for the male hunter to take a trophy. Very few of Botwin's subjects suggest an adulterous affair was worth the thrill.

Although this text pretends to be rooted in reality rather than the analysis of literary amorous affairs by Paz or Llosa, and accordingly, one I found less relevant to the Slackers's search, I found myself culling out some conclusions to impose upon great love stories. Kipnis does not in her book resolve how humans can have it both ways; Botwin recommends cultivating a "almost as good as" relationship with one's spouse. Neither throws the question back to the woman as to what she is placing her want ad for.

Botwin does not make any global conclusions or see any philosophical or culture truths common within marriages and adulteries. In Against Love, at least the author acknowledged there was a mental calculus going on subconsciously in selecting a spouse. Since my son is writing resumes, looking of a job, and because the face to face book club is reading The Reliable Wife this month, I found myself mentally making up "want ads" for husbands and lovers. The qualifications are miles apart. For a husband -- can be a solid, masculine role model for children, confident in job skills, outwardly focused. For a lover -- dedicated to relationship with partner, clever and spontaneous, craves excitement. These seem mutually exclusive.

Maybe it was because of all the power implicit angles in Botwin's capitulation of office affairs that my mind wandered to tabloid accounts. I reached the realization that great love stories have no "volume two" or sequels. Struggle and separation are key elements to never-ending passion, passion that can spark hot for years but not day to day. No one really wants to read about the next act of the former South Carolina governor because we assume his "soul mate" will soon ask him to pick up bread and milk on the way home.

I also compared marriages and affairs to sports (I guess I really had trouble falling asleep last night). Affairs are snow boarding, marriages snow shoeing. And to food: marriages are grocery lists, affairs are menus. Keeping with that analogy, think of how automatic and irresistible it is to see your favorite food on the menu. If it shows sweetbreads or sea bass or raspberries, I have no will power. The sensory overload I am looking forward to is inevitable, cherished, and craved, all the more intense in its infrequency. So far, none of our authors make similar observations about the chemical/physiological match of passion.

Reminds Me of Phil Collins' Lyrics The First Time, The Last Time We Ever Met

So far, this book, The Last Time They Met, by Anita Shreve, is the best book on the 2011 list. It is solid contemporary literature, Shreve an O. Henry prize winner. What construction! If not for the fantastic love story, I would extol it for the way she unveils the plot, in reverse chronology.

Thomas and Linda fell in love senior year in high school. Paz' element of breaking societal norms clearly evident, as he is Boston blue blood, she from Roxbury. But they have a love of Romantic writers and especially poetry. She is a bit of a rebel, making her all the more attractive and extraordinary. The story begins at age 52 when Thomas, a successful poet who has been reclusive for almost thirty years after his daughter drowns, participates in a literary conference where he has managed to have Linda appear. Both are married, although Linda's husband has died; she nevertheless is trying to cope with an alcoholic son and a daughter in medical school with little time for her mother. Their reunion overcomes her distractions and they renew their passion for one brief night. He reprises their earlier love, asking her why she didn't contact him after the accident.

The second, longer section of the book, when they are 26 years old, is set in Kenya (where Shreve herself spent three years as a journalist). Thomas is there with his wife Regina who has a federal grant to study children's health; Linda is there working for the Peace Corps, also married to an English financier. They accidentally meet in a market and resume the most passionate, appealing part of their affair, breaking it off brutally when Thomas' wife becomes pregnant and learns about their fated love. "And knew himself to be in love. If, indeed, he'd ever not been. Not since a day in 1966 when a girl in a gray skirt and a white blouse had crossed the threshold of a schoolroom. It was as if he'd merely been distracted all these years, or had grown weary of loving only memories. And had, against all odds, been returned to a rightful state. Not reminded, but restored. As a sightless man who once had sight will learn to live with his condition, adjust to his darkened universe, and then, years later, when astonishingly he can see again, will know how glorious his world once was. And ll this on nothing but an unlikely meeting and the exchange of a dozen sentences."

Finally, the last section, at 17, is the root of their karma. By this point, the book is a page turner as the reader is desperate to discover the details of the accident and why this obviously star-crossed pair separated in the first instance. I was crying at the end ... but that might be because I am off my hormone treatments and my feminine side is reemerging as my chin hairs are going away.

I feel as though I have to add to Paz list or at least reemphasize certain markers of a great passion: 1. there must be hardships to overcome; 2. there must be forced separations and hungry physical reunions and 3. a love of literature or the romantic tradition itself provides the perfect backdrop. Thomas writes all his adult poetry with Linda as his muse and subject. Despite marrying others and seemingly becoming "a normal wedded family member," both recognize the loss of not just first love, but everlasting love. Wow what a book.

Required Pre-Cana Reading

Still trying to get a good list of fiction about lust, passion and love, I added a few more works of nonfiction to the 2011 list. One such title, Against Love by Laura Kipnis, is described as a polemic to debate if marriage can ever meet the expectation of lifelong pleasure. Kipnis concludes it cannot and that it was only in the 18^th Century with the rise of Romanticism that this belief surfaced.

In the first few sections of her treatise, Kipnis excels at using humor to pinprick societal norms. Her style is almost Swiftian, but this is no satire. By the end of the book, she compares and contrasts the failure of American marriages with the disengagement of the electorate and the disillusion of politics and politicians, especially as evidenced by the plethora of adulterous affairs of elected officials in the Nation’s Capitol in the 90s. A bit off topic to me.

But otherwise her book is so “right-on” and couple with Paz book, provides thoughts to consider when reading a fictional account of passion and/or adultery. Her putting on paper of thoughts and dialogue that married folk assume are safely locked behind closed doors or parried about mentally during long sleepless nights is as if she had emotional sonar. Perhaps the funniest section is on “Couple Linguistics 101.”

“As is true of all human languages, the language of coupledom is governed by a finite set of rules that determine what can be verbalized and how. Let’s call this couple grammar … Close observation reveals that this is a language comprising one recurrent unit of speech – the interdiction … Even if not all couples employ all interdictions, all couples employ the interdiction form, and love means voluntary adherence to them.”

She then goes on to list almost nine pages of rules, commandments and tacit conditions for survival, from letting your partner know where you are and what you’re doing at all times; how household items and chores must be taken care of and by whom and how often; TV protocols; food, dress, conversations. Anyone married immediately recognizes the universality and the stupidity of these commandments once they are put on paper.

She declares the underlying foundation for long term togetherness: “… the fundamental bargain of sustained coupledom – either individual’s autonomy or freedom of movement is of secondary importance compared to the other person’s security and peace of mind.”

But Kipnis only depicts the limits of marriage/coupledom in order to contrast it against adultery:

“Clearly the couple form as currently practiced is an ambivalent one … on the one hand, the yearning for intimacy, on the other, the desire for autonomy; on the one hand, the comfort and security of routine, on the other, its soul-deadening predictability; on the one hand, the pleasure of being deeply known (and deeply knowing another person), on the other, the strait-jacketed roles that such familiarity predicates.”

Not one to acknowledge the nuances between Paz’ red and blue flames, Kipnis I contrast writes:

“Ever optimistic, heady with love’s utopianism, most of us eventually pledge ourselves to unions that will, if successful, far outlast the desire that impelled them into being. The prevailing cultural wisdom is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short-lived phenomenon, nevertheless, that wonderful elixir “mature love” will kick in just in just in time to save the day … the question remaining unaddressed is whether cutting off other possibilities of romance and sexual attraction while there’s still some dim chance of attaining them in favor of the more muted pleasures of “mature love” isn’t similar to voluntarily amputating a healthy limb.”

I am left with the conclusion that Kipnis is politically dissatisfied with both marriage and adultery. Yet she offers no substitutes nor does she itemize what some people actually obtain from one or the other. An interesting treatise, but not a great book.

Red Flame versus Home Fires

I mentioned I picked up eight "lust" books at the library yesterday, fearing I might be snowed in over the weekend. Well, it's cold and very windy, but will venture out to rescue a girlfriend from her husband and son watching the second football playoff game this afternoon. Which puts me in mind of a recent article I read on the Internet about the most successful marriages are those where each partner is a strong individual, more important than the proverbial sense of being a strong couple. Which in turn becomes my segue to comments on Annette Jaffee's The Dangerous Age, a novella about passion in middle age.

Right with the first two paragraphs, Jaffee contrasts the fulfillment of Susan Miller with her lover Robert Parrish compared to the sexual routine with her husband Barry. The sentences are a bit to risque to quote at length, but with Barry asking her, after twenty-five years of marriage if she was satisfied from his love-making, the reader has think "if you have to ask, it didn't happen, duh."

Parts of this story remind me of Nights at Rodanthe: a rich successful woman, a richer lover with a luxury car, perfectly decorated surroundings and wonderful food. How perfect the image of a contemporary American affair. Both lovers have recently undergone surgeries: Susan a hysterectomy and Robert for a bad back. They meet in the gym (shades of Bruce Springsteen?). Robert's sensuality gives Susan new sensations. But he tells stories, some of which eventually recollect his first sex with a prostitute and his high school sweet heart. Susan has no such memories. Besides her husband, who might have been a rebound match, she only lusted for the father of children she babysat.

Like Emma Bovary, Susan gives up her house, all her beautiful furnishings, ultimately her teaching job, alienating her grown children with her divorce. Robert spends weekends with her, nesting in an old farm house where she goes about trying to build a comforting home for the two of them. No other way to sum it up, Robert goes back to his wife and daughters after another health scare, leaving Susan to mourn over her aging body rather than being grateful for her short but satisfying dalliance.

The novella is a quick and engaging read and if somewhat superficial, Jaffee includes enough peeking into bedrooms to keep the pages turning. The story contains Paz perspective of love as violation of the social order. However, here the red flame of passion turns more to the pilot light of domesticity rather than the blue flame of live-long, lasting love.

Girl (France) + Boy (China) = Love (Not)

I actually finished The Lover by Marguerite Duras several days ago but stalled in my review and now face a deadline as I pass it on to another Slacker. Although the story conforms to many of Paz' characteristics of a passionate love story, it was not what I am personally looking for this year.

Again, visiting Wiki after completing the novel, I read how this tale tracks closely to the author's experience. Here's the seed that spawns the "pairing" (I cannot call it love): a poor French girl under sixteen who dresses to attract attention, but not necessarily provocatively, meets an older Chinese man on a ferry crossing the Mekong. The begin an affair while she still attends boarding school. His father, a rich banker, strongly opposes the relationship, while her mother, anxious for any financial improvement in her destitute family, encourages it. The man's "flame" moves along Paz spectrum from the red of lust to the blue of love, lasting years, after his marriage and her return to France.

Well, picked up eight books at the library today; odds are one or two will be better.



So, here we have clearly a "love" that violates the social order and is a challenge to the customs of colonial Asia. While Duras writes as though their meeting was predestined, choice to begin and continue provides the necessary tension common to fated passion. However, what is strikingly absent is any yearning towards completion between the lovers. The Chinese man seems to continue the affair as an effort to his father; the girl to cause a scandalous sensation with her peers while pandering to her mother's penury.

Duras' structure and style at times is as superficial and confused as a teenage diarist yet overlaid with an old woman's reminiscences. There are no chapters to organize the story and the long paragraphs are written in multiple streams of consciousness: recalling her brothers, her education, and her desires to create her own fictional topics so she can realize her ultimate goal of being a writer.

Stepping back from the book and ceding its mismatch with this year's theme, the book is an excellent allegory for the colonial Far East. There is no vivid visuals of Saigon, the city could be anywhere on the peninsula, but the depiction of French dependents, the Chinese mercantile class and the appeal to youth to rebel is well drafted.

Looking for Lust in All the Wrong Places & 2011 List

No matter what synonym I use, I end up with a search engine list of bodice rippers and vampire books or hobbies that people have a "passion" for. I wish this list of lust for 2011 was more extensive but I just guess I will build it as I go along. (And Slackers all, maybe you can let me know about your favorite lusty love stories.)

To repeat those I identified in December, I will add the few I've unearthed after couple days of diligence:

1. A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter -- December 22, 2010
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The Pure and the Impure by Colette
2. The Lover by Marguerite Duras -- January 8, 2011
Nana by Emile Zola -- gave up on finishing
Possession by A S Byatt
The Alchemy of Love and Lust by Theresa Crenshaw
After the Apple by Naomi Rosenblatt
Blood Will Tell by Joe Boso
The Passion by Jeanette Witherspoon
Passion - A Novel of the Romantic Poets by Jude Morgan
Letters of Portuguese Nun by Miriam Cyr
3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov -- April 3, 2011
The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
Salome by Oscar Wilde
Heloise and Abelard by James Burge
4. The Dangerous Age by Annette Jaffee -- January 9, 2011
5. The Physics of Sunset by Jane Vandenburgh -- January 21, 2011
6a. The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve -- January 13, 2011
6b. Where or When by Anita Shreve -- January 25, 2011
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
7. A Rage to Live by John O'Hara -- February 11, 2011. Secret Loves -
8. Women With Two Lives by Sonya Friedman -- January 17, 2011
9. Tempted Women by Carol Botwin -- January 15, 2011
10. Against Love by Laura Kepnis -- January 13, 2011
11. The Double Flame by Octavio Paz -- December 22, 2010
12. Country Girls Triology by Edna O'Brien -- February 19, 2011
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
13. Love and Summer by William Trevor -- January 28, 2011
14. A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias -- January 29, 2011
15. The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi -- January 30, 2011
16. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis -- February 18, 2011
17. Marry Me by John Updike -- February 24, 2011
18. Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff -- March 4, 2011
19a. Justine by Lawrence Durrell -- March 7, 2011
19b. Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell -- March 9, 2011
19c. Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell -- March 16, 2011
19d. Clea by Lawrence Durrell -- March 22. 2011
20a. Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
20b. The Naive and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk -- February 23, 2011
21. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain -- March 23, 2011
22. Vox by Nicholson Baker -- April 4, 2011
23a. The Delta of Venus by Anais Nin -- April 11, 2011
24b. Little Birds by Anais Nin -- April 11, 2011
25a. Philosophy of the Bedroom by de Sade -- April 16, 2011
25b. Justine by de Sade -- May 18, 2011
26. Just Kids by Patti Smith -- May 16, 2011
27. The Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman -- May 5, 2011
28. The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga -- May 29, 2011
29. After the Apple by Naomi Harris Rosenblatt -- June 6, 2011
30. Blood Will Tell: A True Story of Deadly Obsession -- June 7, 2011
31. All the Living by C. E. Morgan -- June 8, 2011
32. Mating by Norman Rush -- June 25, 2011
33. To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal -- July 2, 2011
34a. OFF THEME The Talented Mr Ripley and Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith -- July 12, 2011
34b. Ripley Under Water and Ripley's Game -- July 16, 2011
34c. The Boy Who Followed Ripley -- July 19, 2011
35. SORT OF BACK ON THEME Remembering Smell, by Bonnie Blodgett -- August 25, 2011
36. SORT OF ON THEME: Spousonomics by Szuchman and Anderson -- August 30, 2011
37. ON All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi -- September 3, 2011
38. OFF My Reading Life by Pat Conroy -- September 3, 2011
39. OFF Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman -- September 8, 2011
40. OFF Gamble by Felix Francis -- September 13, 2011
41. ON The Debt to Pleasure by John Lancaster -- September 30, 2011
42. The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues by Susan Griffin -- October 1
43. OFF City of Secrets by Kelli Stanley -- October 13, 2011
44. A DIFFERENT LIVELY SIN: GLUTTONY The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola -- October 17
45. RIGHT ON Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christoper Ryan and Cacilda Jetha -- October 18, 2011
46a. OFF The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes -- October 19, 2011
46b. Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes -- November 12, 2011
46c. Talking It Over by Julian Barnes -- November 12, 2011
46d. Love, Etc. by Julian Barnes -- November 12 2011
47a. OFF (Or is it Right On?) 1968, The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky -- October 20, 2011
47b. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky -- November 12, 2011
48. Lust in Translation by Pamela Druckerman -- October 24, 201
49. OFF The Pattern in the Carpet - A Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble -- October 26, 2011
50. OFF: Choice Cuts by Mark Kurlansky -- November 24, 2012
51. OFF: Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell -- November 26, 2011
52. OFF: Ranchero by Rick Gavin -- December 1, 2011
53. OFF: Darkness and Light by John Harvey -- December 10, 2011
54. OFF: Balzac's Omelette by Anka Muhlstein -- December 22, 2011
55. OFF: Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton -- December 23, 2011

This is slim pickins. There's got to be more out there. What are your teenage high school required readings besides Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina that taught you Slackers all about love and lust?