I don't purchase enough bondage equipment (OK, I haven't actually bought any, unless a roll of duct tape counts.) or tickling tools ('Don't even own a Sonicare.) to be dropping brand names ("Fuller Feather Dusters: What Ticklers Swear By and Ticklees Swear At").<br>
And my real life tickling experiences are wildly uneven--not to mention still a tad too embarrassing to relate on the Forum (except very well disguised in my fiction). <br>
So, what can I blog about that I have the slightest expertise and the most enthusiasm about (outside of wild tickling, of course)?
Why...books!<p>OK, come back! I didn't mean to scare you! <br>But, admittedly, the following will be of interest mostly to the bookish among you. (And that should be quite a few, for I've always maintained that the communities of bibliophiles and ticklephiles have a generous overlap.)<p>I'm a bookseller, and have been for...well, most of my life. This is the time of year when folks consider which books to take on their trips to the beach or the mountains or just the hammock in the backyard. I (cough) happen to have a few suggestions. (And, no, wise guy, I'm not suggesting that you buy 'em from me! Go to the library or your neighborhood indie bookshop or Amazon or Kindle or whatever...)<p>
My three favorite recent novels happen to be set in New York City. (So sue me! It's where I live!) <p>Spanking new (had to get some fetish talk in here somewhere) is Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which uses Phillipe Petit's August 1974 tightrope walk between the (then relatively new) World Trade Center towers as a pivot point for the stories of all sorts of New Yorkers, from an aging South Bronx hooker to a blase municipal judge to a coffee circle of mothers grieving their Vietnam dead to a fanatical Irish monk and the hippie artist who makes a fatal mistake.... The author does a neat tightrope act himself, going from story to story, and made me miss my subway stop more than once--to me, the testament of a great read. (Waitaminnut! How did I get to Grand Central?) <p>Samantha Morton's The American Painter Emma Dial is one of those books where you just want to reach into the pages to slap the heroine silly for all the bad choices she makes, but are too fascinated by the cleverly detailed train wreck to stop reading. The assistant to a famous contemporary artist, Emma actually paints his masterpieces for him. Part of the fun in reading the book is waiting for her to tell him to fuck off. More fun is a peek at the beautiful and lecherous people who make up the Downtown Manhattan art scene--or at least did before the housing bust...<p>Nobody on the planet writes better dialogue than my fellow Bronx native Richard Price, and the Noo Yawk tawk is poifect in LUSH LIFE (which, for you beach bag toters, is in paperback). A young bartender is killed in a Lower East Side hold-up, and we follow the seemingly futile attempt to find his killer in one of the densest and most diverse neighborhoods in town. The talk in this book is so terrific that you can't help reading it aloud, like prose poetry.And every character-- from yuppie dilettantes to hardshelled cops to project kids to a myriad of men on the street--is sketched boldly and assuredly. They seem and talk like people I know, which makes the book tasty as popcorn, but involving like a Dickensian classic. <p>There. That felt good. Man doesn't live by cootchy-coo alone. (I know...heresy!)
And my real life tickling experiences are wildly uneven--not to mention still a tad too embarrassing to relate on the Forum (except very well disguised in my fiction). <br>
So, what can I blog about that I have the slightest expertise and the most enthusiasm about (outside of wild tickling, of course)?
Why...books!<p>OK, come back! I didn't mean to scare you! <br>But, admittedly, the following will be of interest mostly to the bookish among you. (And that should be quite a few, for I've always maintained that the communities of bibliophiles and ticklephiles have a generous overlap.)<p>I'm a bookseller, and have been for...well, most of my life. This is the time of year when folks consider which books to take on their trips to the beach or the mountains or just the hammock in the backyard. I (cough) happen to have a few suggestions. (And, no, wise guy, I'm not suggesting that you buy 'em from me! Go to the library or your neighborhood indie bookshop or Amazon or Kindle or whatever...)<p>My three favorite recent novels happen to be set in New York City. (So sue me! It's where I live!) <p>Spanking new (had to get some fetish talk in here somewhere) is Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which uses Phillipe Petit's August 1974 tightrope walk between the (then relatively new) World Trade Center towers as a pivot point for the stories of all sorts of New Yorkers, from an aging South Bronx hooker to a blase municipal judge to a coffee circle of mothers grieving their Vietnam dead to a fanatical Irish monk and the hippie artist who makes a fatal mistake.... The author does a neat tightrope act himself, going from story to story, and made me miss my subway stop more than once--to me, the testament of a great read. (Waitaminnut! How did I get to Grand Central?) <p>Samantha Morton's The American Painter Emma Dial is one of those books where you just want to reach into the pages to slap the heroine silly for all the bad choices she makes, but are too fascinated by the cleverly detailed train wreck to stop reading. The assistant to a famous contemporary artist, Emma actually paints his masterpieces for him. Part of the fun in reading the book is waiting for her to tell him to fuck off. More fun is a peek at the beautiful and lecherous people who make up the Downtown Manhattan art scene--or at least did before the housing bust...<p>Nobody on the planet writes better dialogue than my fellow Bronx native Richard Price, and the Noo Yawk tawk is poifect in LUSH LIFE (which, for you beach bag toters, is in paperback). A young bartender is killed in a Lower East Side hold-up, and we follow the seemingly futile attempt to find his killer in one of the densest and most diverse neighborhoods in town. The talk in this book is so terrific that you can't help reading it aloud, like prose poetry.And every character-- from yuppie dilettantes to hardshelled cops to project kids to a myriad of men on the street--is sketched boldly and assuredly. They seem and talk like people I know, which makes the book tasty as popcorn, but involving like a Dickensian classic. <p>There. That felt good. Man doesn't live by cootchy-coo alone. (I know...heresy!)
