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 

Note from Jasmine Gold: As the name of this blog indicates, I write erotica. Check out my dark, dystopian novel about naked sex slaves, Mindgames. Your darkest fantasies, with a phenomenal plot and characters you will come to think of as beloved friends. Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited  and in paperback.  Or read my book of short stories about hot, consensual sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire, available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.