Good erotica is worth the effort to find

I grew up reading the classics, almost entirely for fun as opposed to for school.  I read Jane Eyre when I was 11 or so, on a long train ride home from visiting relatives.  Wuthering Heights followed, naturally, and Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway and on and on.

So when I started reading smut, it was natural that I would gravitate towards the classics there too.  I found an old, decrepit copy of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.  Written in gorgeous prose in 1748 by John Cleland while he was in Debtor's Prison, it's a prostitute with a heart of gold story.  The sex is vanilla but so very explicit.  The romance is sweet.  It's not exactly plot-heavy, but it does have a plot, and it has characters with actual characterization.

Today, in a world where we all have access to porn at our fingertips around the clock, and dirty stories of every variety with a little searching, it's hard to remember a time when you had to work to find smut.  You figured out what bookstores carried dirty books  --  I recall a bookstore in the train station in Philadelphia I would stop by whenever I went through the city.  Those books had pages in the back advertising other books, but the only way you could get them was by ordering them by mail, with a check.

Despite the ready availability of smut today, it's worth it to take the time to find the books that are a delight to read.  Fanny Hill, like every classic, has lasted for centuries for a reason. Just as there's nothing particularly wrong with mediocre sex, there's nothing wrong with reading plodding, plotless erotica.  But good sex is worth some effort -- and so is finding good sex stories.

Cheers.

Jasmine Gold