#sunbooks

Delta of Venus by Anais Nin (a great introductory erotic work)

"You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine."

Lady Chatterly's Lover / Women in Love / Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence (ah yes...the one and only)

"They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible flesh (…) the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night (…). She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a mystery (…)"

Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (the revenge...the jealousy...the utter malice!)

"I shall possess this woman; I shall steal her from the husband who profanes her: I will even dare ravish her from the God whom she adores. What delight, to be in turns the object and the victor of her remorse! Far be it from me to destroy the prejudices which sway her mind! They will add to my happiness and my triumph. Let her believe in virtue, and sacrifice it to me; let the idea of falling terrify her, without preventing her fall; and may she, shaken by a thousand terrors, forget them, vanquish them only in my arms."

Fanny Hill by John Cleland (this is so old but its most known for its genitalia euphemisms, a.k.a. 'how else do i describe a cock without calling it a cock')

"...and now, disengag’d from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant. Its prodigious size made me shrink again; yet I could not, without pleasure, behold, and even ventur’d to feel, such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory! perfectly well turn’d and fashion’d, the proud stiffness of which distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet softness might vie with that of the most delicate of our sex, and whose exquisite whiteness was not a little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root..."

Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (see also: Bad Behavior – Mary Gaitskill. includes 'Secretary')

“Oh, I am suffering frightfully.” “Poor friend!” she brushed my disordered hair back from my fore-head. “I hope it isn’t through any fault of mine.” “No—” I replied,—“and yet my love for you has become a sort of madness. The thought that I might lose you, perhaps actually lose you, torments me day and night.” (...) “I can no longer live without you, oh wonderful woman,” I said. “Believe me, believe only this once, that this time it is not a phrase, not a thing of dreams. I feel deep down in my innermost soul, that my life belongs inseparably with yours. If you leave me, I shall perish, go to pieces.”(...)“It shall never end,” I cried excitedly, almost violently. “Only death shall part us. If you cannot be mine, all mine and for always, then I want to be your slave, serve you, suffer everything from you, if only you won’t drive me away.”

The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (a fictional fmc writes to a fictional freud and psychoanalysis ensues)

Emma by Jane Austen (my fav austen book and the prime example of the friends-to-lovers trope. matchless wit and charm. knightley still makes me swoon to this day)

James Joyce's letters to his wife (i picture nanami writing this while huffing and puffing in anxiety as his stuttering, fountain-pen gripped fingers spill ink alongside his guts onto paper)

"My darling Nora, I am panting with eagerness to get your replies to these filthy letters of mine. I write to you openly because I feel now that I can keep my word with you. Don’t be angry, dear, dear, Nora, my little wild-flower of the hedges. I love your body, long for it, dream of it. Speak to me, dear lips that I have kissed in tears. If this filth I have written insults you bring me to my senses again with the lash as you have done before. God help me!"

Lust, Caution / Half a Lifelong Romance / Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (see also: Cosmopolitan Love by Sijia Yao as a further read in understanding the ideas of chinese love and western love)

The Kites by Romain Gary (i recco'd this a few months ago and i'm bringing it up again!)

"I really don't know where I had come up with the idea that love could constitute the whole of life's work and meaning. Probably I had inherited this total lack of ambition from my uncle. Perhaps, too, I had loved too early, too young, with all my being, and there was no room left over in me for anything else."

Crash by J.G. Ballard (i read this after watching the movie adaptation, it's definitely edgy but also violent so proceed with caution)

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (gah. i had to power through this but he writes so viscerally. sex is life and also death)

"She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately--- a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us an we in each other's arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks--- a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die."

Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier (my beach read pick about the constraints of women and the timeless fantasy of lusting after a pirate or what it ultimately symbolises—freedom)

"There was silence between them for moment, and she wondered if all women, when in love, were torn between two impulses, a longing to throw modesty and reserve to the winds and confess everything, and an equal determination to conceal the love forever, to be cool, aloof, utterly detached, to die rather than admit a thing so personal, so intimate."

Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow by Karl Hagstrom Miller (a great insight into country/southern music)

The Kites by Romain Gary (i'm on the hunt for romances this year, much needs to be explored, this genre has yet to keep me intrigued, i always come out disappointed and disgusted, but i know there's got to be good ones out there, the kites being one of them! excerpt: 'I was jealous of her solitudes, of the paths she walked down without me, of the books she took with her and read as if I did not exist. I now knew how to poke fun at myself in these excessively demanding moments, to make light of my tyrannical terrors. I was beginning to understand that you must learn to let all things leave you from time to time—even your reason to live—to grant them their right to be a little inconstant: to take up with solitude, with the horizon, or with those tall plants whose name I did not know, the ones that lose their white heads at the tiniest gusts of wind.')

“The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… — From 'This is Octavia Butler’s best writing advice.' by Vanessa Willoughby. Read on LitHub / 'An Interview with Octavia E. Butler' by Randall Kenan. Read on JSTOR "You need to study what writing requires. Writing has rules, conventions, requirements. There is form. Writing is more than your thoughts about characters. Drama has structure. You can learn." — Excerpted from Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison by A. J. Verdelle. Read on LitHub

observe: listen to conversations around you, the way people talk and react to things, the way they interact with one another. expressing and repressing. or watch films, what do images and scenes look like in your mind. i learned a lot about transitions and flow from movies. take things from the world around you. find what inspires you to write? i usually listen to music!

characters: if writing fanfic is your thing then take the time to think about the characters, their motives, desires, weaknesses, etc etc. read the source material or read hcs and form your own opinion.

"Events, in and of themselves, have no meaning. Lightning striking a vacant lot is pointless; lightning striking a vagrant matters. When an event adds a character, suddenly nature’s indifference fills with life." — Excerpted from CHARACTER: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen by Robert McKee. Read on LitHub (read this once for a creative writing class and thought it was really helpful)

it’s all in the little things: have fun with the details, think about the way a room is lit in the afternoon, or the way a ripe mandarin orange tastes, smells, you could also describe it in action—citrus and pulp and a zesty rind that spits from beneath your fingernails—fill in the blanks with texture and colour and give them a life of their own.

"If you are going to describe a spoon or a chair or a tv set, you don’t want to simply set these things into the scene and let them go. You want to give them some weight, connecting these things to the lives around them." — From 'An Interview with Raymond Carver' by  Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, 1985. Read on JSTOR. (finding the balance between vomiting out descriptions and knowing when to leave things as they are is a struggle for me haha, i get caught up way too much on crafting atmosphere when all the scene calls for is like a sentence or two... i guess its about knowing which is more important, keeping in mind pacing and such too. but im a big believer in instinct, you’ll know whats better for a scene when you read it like fifty times and think... 'maybe geto’s internal monologue and a valid ‘heart beating wildly in his chest’ is enough..’) <3

re: writing styles: ultimately has to do with your personality and how you see the world/the scene you're conveying to an audience. i suppose style stems from the way you weave and thread words together, how you place one word after the other. i think it’ll come to you the more you write, rather than aiming for style, start with the story and the way you look at things.

A unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. . . . Every great, or even every very good writer, makes the world over according to his own specifications. It’s akin to style,... but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. — From “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk,” by Raymond Carver published in The New York Times in 1981.

let your writing be something else, just not yours (in the best sense): sometimes the hardest thing is knowing that your writing will forever be tied to you, there’s a sense of ownership there, like a mother who’s birthed a child after a whole nine months, you’ll work on something for the longest time and not want to give it to anyone, but it has to sort of...get out there. and not every piece of writing will be a precious baby, sometimes it’s just an onion in your garden you found and thought to use in a stew, but the point is that eventually, it’ll belong to the world should you choose to post it. letting it go is catharsis. when i don’t have to look back on it, i can just write the next thing. even if you don’t intend on posting it, i find that i could always just leave things in the drafts, in a document folder, in scraps of paper, and move on to the next thing. i know i can always come back to it. 

i guess...you just have to write? one word after the next until you’ve filled up a page or more. the difference between crafting a beautiful sentence you’re satisfied with and a repetitive, simple one is a whole lot of trial and error + practice (and suffering).

“The only sentence that matters is the one you’re writing.” Do not look ahead two or three sentences, thinking, Oh, but wait, I have to get through two or three more of these sentences before I can get to the really good stuff. Make the sentence you are at the place you are at, and make it a place of stone and steel, not a place of sand and clay. Fashion this sentence out of what has gone before on your page, always moving forward by looking back. Turn, swerve, torque and twist upon what you have written, finding new ways to render your object, and through these maneuvers, finding the way to write your heart out. — From 'The Gordon Lish Notes' by Tetman Callis. Read here.

eventually, you’ll look at the stuff you hate and find ways to make it better, and even then maybe you won’t be completely happy with it but i think it’s important to note that it’s a rather harrowing thing because you’re staring at it wondering if it’s something to be shared...that’s a lot. ultimately i feel it’s perfectly fine to write because you enjoy it, of course, some might say it doesn’t have to be perfect, but because you want it to be good, there needs to be a sense of care and responsibility to make it so. 

You write as well as you can and hope for good readers. But I think you’re also writing for other writers to an extent—the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read. If they like it, the other writers, there’s a good chance other “intelligent, adult men and women” may like it, too. — From 'Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76' by Mona Simpson & Lewis Buzbee for The Paris Review