Books you're currently reading???

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Most remarkable departure from my usual nonfiction these days (must hurry to finish What's So Great About Christianity, D'Souza 2007, before it's due back) is a couple of mysteries. There's a rather charming English-village series that for convenience should be called the Aunt Dimity series... and Aunt Dimity's a ghost who communicates through her personal blue ledger book, in a copperplate hand. Sundry and assorted, even concatenated, intrigues plus slice-of-life in the wholly obscure village of Finch. They're not always murder mysteries. There is the occasional, um, vampire. Or is he? Or she? Or...? By Nancy Atherton.

I'm giving a first try to a series set in late 13th century England that begins with Satan In St. Mary's, P.C. Doherty 1986. I'm comparing it against Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael stuff. It seems more vivid in its sense of time and place -- which early Ellis Peters isn't, could be any time and place -- but the writing suffers from a few too many modifiers. If I like his plotting and historical sense enough, I'll see if he cures that problem and generates leaner prose.

I recently read somewhere that romance novels are relationship porn for women, as contrasted with the copulatory porn men are likelier to read, both being literarily pretty exiguous and hence disposable reading.

And that does a lot to explain yaoi. It may be copulatory, but it's very much a relationship story, without which the buttsex would be deadly dreary.

And where copulatory and relationship porn slide together is lesbian erotica -- popular with anybody with a visceral appreciation of women.