Pervy Reads

Every other month, I make a themed list of selected fiction and non-fiction for my paid subscribers. The first two can be found here and here.

I’m drawn to inspecting desire in its various forms. Studying it feeds my imagination, which feeds my curiosity, and maybe this need is getting a bit deviant, but it’s a symbiotic loop I can’t say no to. Lacan suggests desire is fundamentally rooted in lack, so maybe there’s something in there I’m trying to reach.

But literary desire comes in many forms: sweet and crude, violent and obvious, theoretical, unknown, stubborn, crazy. All of it is welcome, and the more the author is willing to give in, the better the absorption – no need to shy away.

Below the paywall, I’m giving you a curated list of my favorite pervy literature on sexuality, wanting, and desire as a medium. Depraved prose is one of the best vessels of self-knowledge. This one’s for the lovers and the yearners and the wanters. I SEE YOU… I KNOW YOU.

1. Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer

The first time I picked up Tropic of Cancer, I put it down thirty pages in – I was about twenty, still afraid of myself naked, and couldn’t handle the urgency of these hot to touch themes and vivid depictions. Can’t blame myself – Miller writes with excess. He contends with freedom, with a deep care for the human condition and its torments. He’s preemptively crude and fast with language, holding back exactly nothing but a few cents.

A few years later, living in Paris with my humanness all rough around the edges and my heart broken in an unrefined manner a couple of times, I went for a second attempt and I loved it. Miller’s idiosyncratic judgment carries his prose, yet it’s important to read Tropic of Cancer within the context of the time it was written. We’re walked through the dark streets of grief-stricken, sinful French capital preoccupied with sex and pain. This book has no excuses, and it doesn’t ask for them, and that’s what makes it so good.

Perv level: 9/10

Insight: 7/10