Time Again to Celebrate "Bad Sex in Fiction"

The year is ending on a grim note for many, whether it's the tragedy in Aleppo, the Trump transition or the polar vortex. That's why we need the Bad Sex in Fiction Award right now! Every year since 1993, the London-based Literary Review has honored an author who has produced an outstandingly bad sex scene description in an otherwise good novel. The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written sexual description in modern fiction--with the hope that writers will learn to do better.  This year, respected writer Erri De Luca, who has won the 2013 European Prize for Literature, was awarded the booby prize for The Day Before Happiness, in which the Neapolitan orphan protagonist has a penchant for describing erotic moments with wooden (literally) prose such as "My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach" or the rev-me-up "My body was her gearstick." Of course, De Luca faced tough competition from Leave Me by Gayle Forman, a New York Times best-selling author, and A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin, teacher of creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Canin earned his nomination with this sporty passage: "The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced." Meanwhile, nominee Tom Connolly seems confused about what makes a sex scene hot in Men Like Air: "Often she cooked exotic meals and put chillies or spices in her mouth while preparing the food and sucked him while the food cooked and then told him to f---- her while his manhood was burning rock-hard with fire." While The Butcher’s Hook by Janet Ellis earned the judges' attention with the limp "I am pinned like wet washing with his peg," The Tobacconist, by Robert Seethaler, waxed philosophical during a BJ: "...for one blessed moment he felt as if he could understand the things of this world in all their immeasurable beauty. How strange they are, he thought, life and all of these things." Yeah. For more excerpts from this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award nominees, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/17/bad-sex-award-2016-the-contenders-in-quotes

Travel Changes Thinking Not Just Scenery

The holiday vacation period has arrived, and many will be making travel plans--whether an annual pilgrimage to a family home or a journey to an exotic land. So here's a timely look at just three of the latest crop of travel best sellers courtesy of the New York Times listing. Atlas Obscura, by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton Workman offers nearly 500 pages about more than 700 hidden marvels, events and curiosities around the world. That's an almost overwhelming amount of inspiration for the adventurous! If you want to stick with the less exotic, check out The Road to Little Dribbling, an irreverent travelogue around Britain by American expat Bill Bryson, or go for a more luxe experience with The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J. Mazzeo, about the history of Paris' famous cultural landmark, the Hotel Ritz. But mainly, I hope your travel reading will inspire actual travel plans, since prose, no matter how intriguing, is no substitute for real exploration. A trip, whether to a neighboring town or a country on the other side of the world, can broaden understanding, providing new perspectives, unlimited by ignorance and bias, on peoples and cultures. An open-minded tourist is following the sage counsel of Mark Twain, also a talented travel writer: "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime." The best journeys then aren't about seeking a change in scenery but finding a change in thinking. So don't just read a travel book, use it to inform your next real-life travel adventure. Take the advice of Saint Augustine to heart: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." For more travel best sellers, see http://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/travel/?_r=0