Look at me, reading shit and all

[lunabee34]

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this one. I knew a little bit about most of the people discussed in this book (you can't study Victorian literature without knowing bit about Richard Burton or Swinburne or the Rossettis, for example) but only the very superficial. This is a really interesting look at several loosely connected and intersecting groups of people (the pre-Raphaelites, the Cannibal Club, and the Aesthetes) and how their art and lives were focused on their sexual experiences. The book is written much more like creative non-fiction than the usual academic book, so it's incredibly readable. Every now and again, the author uses an awkward turn of phrase or says something in a confusing way or gets out her thesaurus just to remind us that we are reading the work of the erudite, but on the whole, the style is very readable and accessible and the subject matter is deeply interesting.



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Oronooko: The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not one I'll be rereading. I somehow missed reading this in college and wouldn't have read it now except that I'm teaching it. I know it's an important text, and I'm glad I've read it, but I found it very underwhelming. Also, the almost complete lack of dialogue made reading it fairly tedious.



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Comments

[chelseagirl]

You have Desperate Romantics icons??? I thought I was the only person who ever watched this!

[executrix]

I do indeed have Desperate Romantics icons! In fact I started watching Being Human because I thought of Aidan Turner as the Desperate Romantics guy and not the LOTR guy, and I thought he (and his adhesive bath towel) were the best things about Then There Were None. Although I also really liked Samuel Barnett in Desperate Romantics.

[kore]

he (and his adhesive bath towel) were the best things about Then There Were None

YES

He was great on Being Human, too, even if his story (and the show) kind of went really off the rails into a pit of angst. That first season was wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pUnL5Sd458

[chelseagirl]

And I watched Being Human first, then Desperate Romantics. I was glad for him that the Hobbit movies raised his public profile, even though his subplot was widely mocked. And now he's Ross Poldark! (I grew up with the original.)

I just try to forget that he was born the year I graduated from college. ;-)

[executrix]

I really enjoyed S1 of Poldark but I ragequit S2 because I heard about (spoiler).

[kore]

LOL this is the Desperate Romantics fanclub now. Critics mocked it, but I ate it up.

[chelseagirl]

Oh, it was ridiculous, but also delightful!

Aidan Turner looked like Rossetti looked like in his own mind, I think. ;-)

[lunabee34]

I love that description of Rossetti!