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    An abbywinters book club?

    I was just watching a new models solo video (keep your eyes pealed for the lovely Calina) and she mentioned she enjoys reading.

    This got me thinking. Would anyone be interested in an abbywinters.com book club?

    We could pick a book - all agree to read it by a certain date and then see what everyone thought?

    With so many different cultures coming together on the boards I thought this might be a great chance to read something I might not normally pick up.

    Would anyone be interested?

    #2
    Dear Masie,

    As always you do come up with the best ideas :-)
    Great thoughts, and hope that the book will have only few pages ;-)

    Love and heaps of hugs Sabrina

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      #3
      Ooh, this sounds like a lot of fun! I really would like to start reading again for pleasure once my PhD is over (somehow, spending my whole day looking at words and writing words means that the last thing I want to do is come home and look at more words!) and this would be a great way of doing it!

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        #4
        Great idea, Masie! I'd join in. I've gotten lots of great reading ideas from AW models, as detailed here, but it would be fun to share a book with AW friends!

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          #5
          I'd be potentially down. I haven't been reading at all really the last few years, but I really need to start up again.

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            #6
            YES!!! I want in!!! What could be a nice, easy read to start with?

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              #7
              I think this sounds really fun! A good way to start might be to create a suggestion box (on some kind of site, I've used freesuggestionbox.com before, it's pretty good for things like this) so we can all submit book ideas.

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                #8
                Hannah that is a great practical bit of advice - I will look into how we do that later this week.

                I am really happy so many people are up for this!

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                  #9
                  For the last few months I have permanently been hungry and searching for a new good book to read, but have you ever been in a state when you know you want to read something but nothing is too good to read it to the end? I just hate this feeling of unsatisfactory. Hope that this little challenge and team work will finally make me more responsible and read a book from the first page to the last. I'm in! Should we read something spicy?)

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                    #10
                    For now I think we should just use the boards to put down our book selection.

                    I propose we all put two books we would recommend (you can have read it before of just have heard of it) and then I will put these on bits of paper and will pull one out at random and that will be our first book.

                    Would it be fair to ask everyone to post their suggestions by Monday 23rd September?

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                      #11
                      Well, I don't read that much these days, but I have always loved reading books. I don't know if anyone would be interested in the John Sandford books, but if you haven't read any of them, you need to start with "Rules of Prey". Every book after that, basically has references to the books that preceded them. All of this line of his books are "prey" books, such as, "Shadow Prey", "Eyes of Prey", "Silent Prey", "Winter Prey", and on and on. I felt that they were really good books, but that's just me. Maybe others won't enjoy them as much as I did, but if you like suspense novels, then you should check these books out.

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                        #12
                        Yes, I would be interested. Although as I have my own huge wish list of books to read and not a lot of time on my hands, I don't think I will be contributing a great deal, but I will be looking at the discussion as I love reading books. It's difficult to choose 2 novels so I have left out anything too cultish or anything that might resemble a reading list for a literature degree-so I have gone for these two well-written but entertaining stories.

                        Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I choose this one because I think models and fans of AW will really like it as it deals with lesbian love and 19th century pornography (in fact it could turn out that many of you have read it already!) Recently made into a brilliant film called The Handmaiden.

                        Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin. Written of course by the author of the novels of that extremely popular adult fantasy TV series-an excellent horror-adventure story set on the Mississippi river in the 19th century, featuring vampires and steamboats. I would love this to be made into a film or TV show.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by georgexxx20 View Post
                          Yes, I would be interested. Although as I have my own huge wish list of books to read and not a lot of time on my hands, I don't think I will be contributing a great deal, but I will be looking at the discussion as I love reading books. It's difficult to choose 2 novels so I have left out anything too cultish or anything that might resemble a reading list for a literature degree-so I have gone for these two well-written but entertaining stories.

                          Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I choose this one because I think models and fans of AW will really like it as it deals with lesbian love and 19th century pornography (in fact it could turn out that many of you have read it already!) Recently made into a brilliant film called The Handmaiden.

                          Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin. Written of course by the author of the novels of that extremely popular adult fantasy TV series-an excellent horror-adventure story set on the Mississippi river in the 19th century, featuring vampires and steamboats. I would love this to be made into a film or TV show.
                          I second Fingersmith!

                          I'd also like to nominate American Classics in general. Those will be cheap, are probably also for sale in thriftshops and other secondhand places and they'll probably also come in different languages.

                          This Goodreads list might be handy in picking a book everyone likes and is easily available! https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/..._At_Least_Once

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Originally posted by georgexxx20 View Post
                            Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. I choose this one because I think models and fans of AW will really like it as it deals with lesbian love and 19th century pornography (in fact it could turn out that many of you have read it already!) Recently made into a brilliant film called The Handmaiden.
                            Another vote for this! I've loved everything by Sarah Waters that I've read so far. I'd also put Tipping the Velvet on the list, which is a wonderful historical lesbian book by her, and which also has a three-part BBC adaptation (starring the beautiful Rachel Stirling and Keeley Hawes)...

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                              #15
                              Do you guys have some tittles about painters/ musicians sexual life?
                              Iam really keen into the hidden biography of and art related representative.

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                                #16
                                I fully agree with Fingersmith, and also Tipping the Velvet that Maddie mentioned, which is also by Sarah Waters. I’m a real fan of hers. Even better than those two, I think, are two others that she wrote: The Night Watch, which is set during and after the Second World War in London, and The Little Stranger, which is set in the 1950s in a small English country town and is the best ghost story I’ve ever read. All her books are about lesbian women because Sarah Waters is gay herself, and she says that that’s the world she knows. The only exception is the ghost story, The Little Stranger, which I think is actually the best of her books but isn’t really about sex at all.

                                Another book set in Victorian times like Fingersmith, but this time about the world of criminals and prostitutes (as they were always called then), is The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber. It’s a compelling read, very sexy and very informative at the same time. It goes off the rails a bit at the end, but it’s great.

                                All of those books are available in any good bookshop, and they’re all also available as audiobooks through Audible.com.

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                                  #17
                                  That was easy - it seems with have our first book - Fingersmith!

                                  I am really excited to get going with this and look forward to having a group of people to share a book with and to dive into all the details with.

                                  Now we have a book how long do you think we should allow to read it = is a month a sensible amount of time?

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                                    #18
                                    Oh wow, great idea George and everyone who suggested Fingersmith! I've been meaning to read it for a while, especially after the Korean movie adaptation The Handmaiden came out, which I didn't see because I thought I should read the book first. And now I will, with all of you! I'm on holiday in Spain, with some long bus and train rides between cities coming up, so I just got the book on my Kindle now. Looking forward to chatting about it!

                                    I think a month is OK for me. It's a long-ish book at over 500 pages, if that's a concern for anyone else, though. Masie, will new model Calina be joining us, since she inspired our book club?

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                                      #19
                                      No spoilers for everyone who's still reading, but I finished Fingersmith on my flight back from Europe, and it is amazing! I tore through the last 250 pages or so in a day or two, it was that enthralling. Thanks again to those who suggested it: talk to you all about it in a few weeks!

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                                        #20
                                        Official Book Club Read by Date is: October 31st - From 1st November I am looking forward to reading what everyone made of the book (good and bad) and what questions and themes everyone wants to unpick and discuss!

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                                          #21
                                          Okay, disclaimer: I’m a huge Sarah Waters fan. I read Tipping the Velvet as one of my first forays into lesbian literature and I’ve been hooked ever since. I love historical fiction and I love the way Waters blends the beauty and style of the past with the graphic sex and passion of the present - certainly not a combination that seems to occur too often given our tendency to sanitise the past (and one of the reasons why, if anyone has read my film thoughts elsewhere on the boards, I loved The Favourite so much)! Fingersmith was absolutely no exception, and I knew I’d love it, and I did.

                                          I’m not sure how spoilery we want to get in these book club threads, but Fingersmith’s best aspect for me is how the structure of it with the two perspectives works so well with the way the story ends. I like seeing the same events from different character’s’ perspectives as a general feature, but something about the way the plot went makes it even more of an effective narrative device, tying Maude and Sue together in a mirror-image sort of way. I know Waters has a slight habit at times of going into a lot of detail on small things, but I’ve read Les Miserables the whole way through so I can live with that! And her characters are so well-formed, so human, the sorts of people I cared about and wanted the best for, and I was a very satisfied and happy reader!

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            I’d forgotten about this so thanks, Maddie, for bringing it back.

                                            I also think Fingersmith is a very good book and that Sarah Waters is an excellent novelist. Her novels are all set in the past (Fingersmith is set in Victorian times) and one of the things that strikes the reader of her novels is the hundreds of tiny details of everyday life that are mentioned and lend realism to the characters and the story. In her interview she said she was motivated to write a particular novel as much by her interest in learning about the period in which it’s set as by the desire to tell the story. One of the reasons I like her books so much is that I learn so much from them.

                                            They’re also very sexy. She’s a lesbian and she writes predominantly about lesbian women, and she is wonderful at capturing the emotions of falling in love and sexual desire; it’s very erotic without being graphic in the descriptions of actual physical acts.

                                            I think the story of Fingersmith, which Maddie has alluded to, is very strong. I think it does have its weaknesses; the revelation of what was in the uncle’s mysterious library, and the way she ultimately makes her living when the uncle has died, stretch credulity a bit, but those are relatively minor faults. It’s a novel I would strongly recommend; in fact I would strongly recommend all her novels with only a couple of exceptions (Affinity and The Paying Guests).

                                            I have a suggestion about this thread. Instead of choosing a book for everyone to read and comment on, why not just have it open for anyone to write about any book they want to, at any time? So if someone reads a book they like, they can post about it here and say what it’s about and why they liked it, and others might be inspired to read it and write about it too. And comments need not always be positive: if you read a book that you think is overrated then you can write about that. (Eg I have just read The Handmaid’s Tale, which everyone seems to think is marvellous, but I thought it was unmitigated rubbish from beginning to end.) In other words I’m suggesting a general book discussion thread rather than the formal book club structure.

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                                              #23
                                              I think it's important to have in mind when reading Fingersmith, that Sarah Waters was heavily influenced by Victorian Sensation novels, for instance Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White-and thus not strictly realist. It's as much an imaginative construct as fantasy but containing nothing of the supernatural. Wikipedia describes sensation novels "as a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s. Its literary forebears included the melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies; it also drew on the gothic and romantic genres of fiction." Fingersmith contains the gothic too, an old creepy house, a secret library of forbidden books and an insane asylum, all tropes from the gothic novel. I liked the ending of Fingersmith, implying that the outré erotic imagination is not just for upper class men.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                Originally posted by georgexxx20 View Post
                                                I liked the ending of Fingersmith, implying that the outré erotic imagination is not just for upper class men.
                                                If you’re interested in the non-fiction angle of that idea, George, one of the best books I’ve read for my PhD is The Secret Museum by Walter Kendrick. It’s a fascinating exploration of how the categories of pornography and erotica have been used to maintain and reinforce social power dynamics with who gets access to specific knowledges, and it’s a very well-written and interesting book! I’d not drawn comparisons between the two before, but your comment sparked a thought

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                                                  #25
                                                  Thanks Maddie, I'll add that to my large list of books to read! I'm very interested in erotica and pornography both written and visual, the intellectual and artistic debates surrounding it and vintage erotica from the 18th and 19th century to the 'permissive society' of the 60's and 70's (and not just for personal sexual arousal)

                                                  As everyone here is interested in sex and desire in some way or other I wonder if the next book be centred on that. It could be a classic or popular 'dirty book' like Delta of Venus or The Story of O or something not written as erotica but has as its main subject sex and desire, for instance J.G. Ballard's Crash (warning-this novel is maybe too strange, avant-garde and transgressive for a wider readership but it's one of my favourites)

                                                  Anybody else got any ideas for a well-written dirty or racy book to read next? (apologies to any fans, but not Fifty Shades of Grey!) Or if the thread begins to dry up maybe we should take on Jackson's idea which I think is a good one.

                                                  Comment


                                                    #26
                                                    Originally posted by georgexxx20 View Post
                                                    Thanks Maddie, I'll add that to my large list of books to read! I'm very interested in erotica and pornography both written and visual, the intellectual and artistic debates surrounding it and vintage erotica from the 18th and 19th century to the 'permissive society' of the 60's and 70's (and not just for personal sexual arousal)

                                                    As everyone here is interested in sex and desire in some way or other I wonder if the next book be centred on that. It could be a classic or popular 'dirty book' like Delta of Venus or The Story of O or something not written as erotica but has as its main subject sex and desire, for instance J.G. Ballard's Crash (warning-this novel is maybe too strange, avant-garde and transgressive for a wider readership but it's one of my favourites)

                                                    Anybody else got any ideas for a well-written dirty or racy book to read next? (apologies to any fans, but not Fifty Shades of Grey!) Or if the thread begins to dry up maybe we should take on Jackson's idea which I think is a good one.
                                                    I fucking love JG Ballard. High Rise is one of my favorite books. It's also about desire and branches off into a study of human's primal urges and how those would look in a modern and 'developed' world. So good.

                                                    Comment


                                                      #27
                                                      If you want a suggestion for a really good erotic book, mine would be Stephen Vizinczey’s “In Praise of Older Women”. It’s not so well-known as Story of O or Anaïs Nin’s books but it’s very intelligent and very sexy. It’s basically an account written in the first person of a boy’s introduction to sex at the hands (and other parts) of an older woman, and his exploration of sex with a succession of older women. What sets it well apart from most erotic novels is that each of the women the narrator encounters is an individual in her own right, with her own personality. The narrator falls in love with all of them, and they are written about with genuine tenderness. They’re also all different sexually, and the way each of them makes love and is aroused and achieves satisfaction is described fully and very credibly — without the use of “dirty words”.

                                                      Comment


                                                        #28
                                                        Originally posted by lotte_l View Post
                                                        I fucking love JG Ballard. High Rise is one of my favorite books. It's also about desire and branches off into a study of human's primal urges and how those would look in a modern and 'developed' world. So good.
                                                        Lotte, you have taste! Ballard is my favourite writer-in fact I'm a bit obsessed with him, which if you know your J.G. Ballard is only appropriate. Yes, High-Rise is an excellent choice!

                                                        Comment

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