Sev's recommended reads

• Carol Queen's:
  • Exhibitionism For the Shy, nonfiction. Recommended for anybody who likes to dress up sexy, who'd like to spice up their sex life, or who'd just like to be less shy.
  • Real Live Nude Girl. Autobiographical, and more hot prose from this pro-sex activist.
  • Switch Hitters (editor), Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica
  • The Leather Daddy and the Femme, glimpsed in Doing it For Daddy. Very hot stuff. I impatiently awaited this book for months and months, and I was gratified to find that it was filled with even more hot genderfucking leathersex than I expected.
• Pat Califia, a longtime SM community activist and a prominent anti-censorship feminist, has written and edited all sorts of wonderful books, including:
  • Diesel Fuel -- hot, sexy poetry by a leatherdyke.
  • Macho Sluts. Apparently the first printing of the first edition of this book had a "Macho Sluts" button attached to it -- mine didn't. The new cover isn't as pretty, IMO, but I'm glad it's being reprinted.
• Real Gorgeous: The Truth about Body and Beauty by Kaz Cooke. Highly recommended for any woman, anyone who's body conscious or has a self-image that sometimes flounders, or anyone who loves someone with these issues.
• Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation. I keep putting this one down and picking it back up again. There's significantly less "praise" than I was expecting; it seems more of "a discussion of difficult women," instead.
• Dave Duncan's:
  • I love coming-of-age stories, especially ones as unusual and far-reaching as the A Man of His Word series: Magic Casement, Perilous Seas, Faery Lands Forlorn, and Emperor and Clown.
  • The Handful of Men series is the sequel to A Man of His Words. Duncan's done several trilogies and series, and they're definitely superior to his single-volume works.
• Out of the blue one day, one of my coworkers handed me Fool's War by Sarah Zettel. An extremely likeable main character stole my heart and kept me fascinated until the very last page -- and after it was all over, I nearly cried.
• While I was sitting at a coffee shop on Broadway reading Fool's War, a woman walked past me a tucked her business card into the book. "People who like Sarah's books often like mine," she said. And she was right. She was Susan R. Matthews, and her pair of novels An Exchange of Hostages and Prisoner of Conscience, while much darker than anything Zettel has written, haunt me to this day.
• My housemate Mez owns a lot of books by Iain M. Banks, and lately I've been wandering off with them and reading them.
  • The first one I read was The Player of Games, which had me spellbound. Every aspect of the setting -- the pampered Culture, the decadent Empire of Azad, the Player himself, and so on -- seems to be an insightful enlargement of various aspects of the reality I inhabit. I love books that make me turn around and look hard and long at myself.
• Tom Cool has written two satisfying action-based sci-fi novels that feed my need to turn down the volume on my brain:
  • I picked up Infectress at random because I was bored and wanted something to read. Glad I did -- it was rolllicking, believable, and a lot of fun.
  • His second novel, Secret Realms, is more thought-provoking, but still is a relaxing read. Cool is a military man, and it's very satisfying to see him take a hard look at his own culture from a rather unusual perspective.