THE SEXIEST NOVELS EVER WRITTEN? So you have trouble believing that I go to Playboy.com for the articles? Well, you're right--I don't go there at all! Except, you see, I learned through Fleshbot that Playboy.com now includes a list of The 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written. I'll leave it to others to use the list as a platform for accusing compilers James R. Peterson and Stacy Klein of racism; instead, I'll settle for raising doubts about the selections.

I mean, I'm a big admirer of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I'm not sure I'd even put it on the list (where it takes the #3 position). The book is very important historically, as is Lady Chatterley's Lover (#2 position), but there have got to be sexier novels. Here's another listed book that I like (including its Chip Kidd design) although I question its "sexinesss": The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (#9 position).

One choice I heartily endorse: Scott Spencer's Endless Love (#10 position), which I can't recommend strongly enough for its literary merits as well as its erotic qualities. Spencer's artfully, breathlessly told tale of passion and obsession draws the reader into a world of desire. WARNING: The same does not apply to the song and movie the book "inspired"!

Here's how it starts: "When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved--I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably." Oh yeah, baby!

And here's the Endless Love sample offered by Playboy.com:

Her back was soaked with sweat and the sheets were like slush. I was panting and sweating myself and sore all over but I didn't want to stop, neither of us did. The friction, our need of it, wasn't really connected to pleasure at that point. It was more of an attempt to erase our bodies and explode out of them into pure matter. It was afternoon, there was soft light in her little room, and when she spread her legs and offered her rump to me I looked at the back half of her vagina, with the dark brown hair sopping wet and pointing out in curly spikes. I'll never understand exactly what the sight of her body did to me, I mean why it worked the way it did, but its effect was so powerful, so unfailingly powerful that I believed then and will always believe that I was born to see it, to look at her face, throat, breasts, genitals, and feel a heat and spaciousness that no word in my vocabulary can even begin to express. I think that after all of that wet, wet fucking I was only three-quarters hard, but the sight of her backside restored me to my unanimous erection and at once I began to move myself into her.

Okay, maybe that "unanimous" is a bit much (the Playboy.com people comment on it too), but if you read the book from the beginning you might not even care. It's all good when you're in the right mood.