The ballad of Lady Chatterley and eight 11-year-old girls.
I finished Lady Chatterley's Lover last night and with that I have read 40 books off my Filling in the Gaps list. The list isn't really all that serious, it's too fluid to be, really, since I delete and add books to it at a breakneck speed, but what it does is help me read more. With the list (currently consisting of 122 books) I can sort of compete against myself, and there is a certain satisfaction in crossing out book after book. I even end up liking most of them.
So Lady Chatterley's Lover now. Not a bad book in all, even though I at first didn't understand why everybody was all up in arms over sexual content. Lawrence has this lamentable preoccupation with "feeling things in the bowel" in the middle of sex, which is less romantic/sexy/intimate and more "I'm experiencing diarrhea right now", but aside from that...
Yesterday, though, I was teaching the Swedish class of Student's Choice and since half the class was gone, the puppet theatre they were planning got rain checked in favor of making Christmas cards. This left me with an unexpected amount of leisure time, since these girls can pretty much handle themselves. So after I had done all the correcting books I was going to do for the day, I pulled up Chatterley and decided to read some, while the 11 year olds giggled in a corner.
If you haven't read this book, let me fill you in. The first half is fairly tame, but there comes a point somewhere roughly halfway through where it throws all pretense out the window. The first thing I set my eyes on was a treatise on cunt and what it was, followed by a discussion of a female butt. Cocks named John Thomas and cunts named Lady Jane (Jinny for short), tits, haunches, and more fucking than you can shake a stick at followed. And there I was, in the middle of a classroom, surrounded by 11 year olds and thinking, "Thank god none of these kids know how to read English."
Not a bad book, though. I liked it.
So Lady Chatterley's Lover now. Not a bad book in all, even though I at first didn't understand why everybody was all up in arms over sexual content. Lawrence has this lamentable preoccupation with "feeling things in the bowel" in the middle of sex, which is less romantic/sexy/intimate and more "I'm experiencing diarrhea right now", but aside from that...
Yesterday, though, I was teaching the Swedish class of Student's Choice and since half the class was gone, the puppet theatre they were planning got rain checked in favor of making Christmas cards. This left me with an unexpected amount of leisure time, since these girls can pretty much handle themselves. So after I had done all the correcting books I was going to do for the day, I pulled up Chatterley and decided to read some, while the 11 year olds giggled in a corner.
If you haven't read this book, let me fill you in. The first half is fairly tame, but there comes a point somewhere roughly halfway through where it throws all pretense out the window. The first thing I set my eyes on was a treatise on cunt and what it was, followed by a discussion of a female butt. Cocks named John Thomas and cunts named Lady Jane (Jinny for short), tits, haunches, and more fucking than you can shake a stick at followed. And there I was, in the middle of a classroom, surrounded by 11 year olds and thinking, "Thank god none of these kids know how to read English."
Not a bad book, though. I liked it.