Reading is Bliss: Erotica will save us all | Stuff.co.nz

Thanks to a certain middle-aged former TV producer called Erika James and a little publishing phenomenon called Fifty Shades of Grey, erotica seems to have not so much crept its way into the mainstream, as landed with noisy squawks and a puff of feathers on the bestseller charts.

Erotic literature isn't new. If you think of writers like Marquis de Sade and Anais Nin, it's been around for centuries, but mostly consigned to dusty back rooms or the moldy bottoms of bargain bins.

Going back even further, the Kama Sutra was a form of erotica, not to mention Japan's The Pillow Book, which contains the correct etiquette to conduct an extra-marital affair for highborn court ladies.

Recently, a glut of erotica has flooded the market following E.L James' successful Fifty Shades trilogy. Prolific erotic author Sylvia Day has released titles like Bared To you and Reflected in You. She is one of the fastest-selling writers of the past decade, in both the crucial UK and US reading markets - in both print and e-book format.

Then there's A.N Roquelaure, who writes titles like The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty and Beauty's Punishment. Three guesses as to what her books are mostly about.?

The Millions recently published an article called A Sentimental Education: Sex and the Literary Writer. In it, the writer, who is also a published author, described the scorn of her former English professors, who denigrated the "scribbling women writers of the 19^th century...one of my professors explained with more than a hint of disdain, were the equivalent of our modern-day Danielle Steele and Jackie Collins".

Now I will defend to the death the joys of being an English lit major and more specifically, the right to do an arts degree - which students are often advised, especially in today's political climate, to throw over in favour of the hard sciences and other subjects that will "get you jobs". Never mind that universities were originally founded for the study of philosophy, and that for centuries "the arts" were the lifeblood of higher education...

The point is, I actually think the mainstreaming of erotica isn't such a bad thing. It will, in fact, probably be one of the saving graces of literature.

When you consider that women prisoners at some of the UK's toughest jails are clamouring to read Fifty Shades, that over 70 million copies of "that dirty book" has sold in print, audio and e-book editions in Europe (it probably single-handedly paid the salaries for most of Random House last year, in fact, every US employee that had been on the payroll for over a year got a $5000 thank-you bonus in December), and has attracted countless spoofs and no small amount of critique. And yet the phenomenon stands, beating even J.K Rowling's remarkable Harry Potter feat.

The book industry has always been a tough game. As more forms of entertainment appear, in the form of iPads, smartphones, portable gaming machines like the Wii U, the worry is that younger generations will no longer read. Even older generations, saturated every which way by Google Glass this and iWatch that, on top of demanding jobs, family time and the stresses of global warming, often find it hard to sneak in an hour here and there of reading time.

Reading as a hobby is a little like knitting. It requires that you possess the skills and tenacity to see a project through. If what will ultimately save the industry is Fifty Shades and its ilk, then I say to those authors - write on, and readers, read on. Because as long as someone, somewhere is reading a book...any damn book, it means there's a chance they will read others, across a variety of genres, and that's what will keep publishing alive for generations of readers to come. So to hell with book snobbery and embrace erotica - it will save us all.

What do you think of the new breed of erotica?

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Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/reading-is-bliss/8542551/Erotica-will-save-us-all

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