Photo via Splash

We finally got around to reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and we weren't disappointed: It's haunting and brilliant and just so beautifully written. It's also a 166-page meditation on just how bad things can get when you're deficient in both sex ed and foreplay. And also? It contains the most visceral, disturbing description of a kiss that we've ever read. It makes our list of the Top 10 Things You Never Want to Hear After a First Kiss sound like glowing compliments. It's meant to, of course--McEwan's just that good. We defy you to fully enjoy a French kiss in the 24 hours after reading this excerpt (after the jump). Consider it the BookRabbit edition of 2 Girls, 1 Cup. (We had to watch like three John Hughes movies just to get in a kissing mood again.) ...

Between the States and Britain, only the U.K.--which dedicates miles of beautifully designed ad space to new and forthcoming books throughout its Underground subway system in London--could or would have a site dedicated to book nerds that's part bookstore, part book club and part dating site (though in typical reserved British fashion, it doesn't admit to this last service). BookRabbit.com is a new site that allows members (readers, authors, publishers) to find or promote favorite titles, with the top 100,000 available for purchase at prices cheaper than Amazon.co.uk. Instead of a sexy Photoshopped picture from ten years ago, members upload pix of their bookshelves to their profiles--aw yeah--in an effort to promote discussion and recommendations and, we think, love or lust relationships straight out of Wuthering Heights, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or anything with Fabio on the cover....

Actually, what lives on a person's bookshelf can be pretty revealing of that person's personality, values, interests, even fantasies--maybe even more so than a personal ad they might write for themselves would be, since those often end up describing the person they wish they were rather than the person they are. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly judge a person by the books they covet.

You just know the guy who has nothing but sci-fi on his shelf is either a virgin or a sub at the local fetish club who likes to go topless in leather pants and a studded collar. Could you really have anything in common with someone who owns Sting's memoir? The bookshelves that are neat and organized alphabetically suggest control freaks who think anal play is disgusting. The overflowing ones with no rhyme or reason might be the property of slightly spacey, arty types who'll take you for a rollercoaster ride and give you a decent neck rub on a date--or maybe they're just neurotic pack rats who can't get anything done, including finishing reading a book. Even the knick-knacks decorating the shelves are dead giveaways, i.e. stay away from the woman with the teddy bear on hers..

As sex writers we tend to think that, while plenty still makes us blush, there's not a lot that we haven't at least heard about. But we had no idea that the elder dating scene was so saucy (even after interviewing performance artist Christen Clifford about elder sex). Naively enough, we just kind of assumed that dating in the twilight years got all chaste and 1950s-esque. Author Bob Morris thought the same thing until his 80-year-old dad started dating again, mere months after his mother's death. It's both heartening and heartbreaking to learn that dating in your eighties is rife with just as many playas and game-playing as in your twenties, as Morris chronicles in Assisted Loving: Tales of Double Dating with My Dad.

Rebecca Miller is doing her best to single-handedly make up for all the vapid mactresses in this world: she's a director, screenwriter, artist, actress, short story writer, and novelist who wrote and directed the films The Ballad of Jack and Rose and Personal Velocity. Oh yeah, and she's the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and the wife of Daniel Day Lewis. But after reading her most recent novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, we think we've found her Achilles heel: writing sex scenes. Don't get us wrong: we enjoyed the book--it's a lovely story of a woman figuring out who she is after a few happy decades of being Wife and Mother. And for the most part, it's beautifully written--even when the story moves to a shady basement SM club. But this scene, when (spoiler alert, sorry) a menopausal Pippa Lee sleeps with a 30-something ex-missionary turned slacker, was a serious needle-off-the-record moment. The dude in question, who has a massive Christ figure tattooed on his chest, has just wooed Pippa into the back of his pick-up truck, which is decorated with tea light candles:

She felt his hand on her sex. She opened her eyes. The tattoo loomed over her; the wings of the Christ seemed to spread wide and real above her, pulsing up and down, making the sound of two dry hands rubbing against each other as they brushed the sides of the plastic shell. This can't be real, she thought. And then, out of nowhere, a pleasure ballooned from her sex, swelled to fill her body until it burst, the sensation running down her legs, and she cried out, her head falling lifeless on the mattress, her body lank as the neck of a dead swan. Sadness trailed behind the pleasure like the tail of a comet. Grief and rage shot out of her mouth like flames. He held her head between his palms as she sobbed.

Probably in reaction to un-evolved people like us who can't fathom conquering jealousy, two books in one month have come out on non-monogamy: the first is Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships  by Tristan Taormino, one of our Bedpost Interviewees (the second is Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block). While Jenny's is more memoir, Tristan's is more guide--how you actually make it work (though Tristan's never afraid to talk about the ins and outs of her own experiences). In conjunction with the book, she's started her own open community. We asked her the same five questions we're going to ask Jenny. Stay tuned for the next post, then compare and contrast.

Em & Lo: What's the biggest misconception people have about open relationships?

Tristan Taormino: This isn't the biggest, but since every interviewer has asked me this question, I need to come up with a different one each time: if you're non-monogamous, it's because you are confused and indecisive. Most non-monogamous people are very clear about why they choose non-monogamy and what they want and need out of their relationships. It's not that they can't choose between partners, it's that they don't want to and believe strongly that they don't have to. 

Do you think anyone could be in an open relationship with the right attitude, or are some people just hardwired for monogamy and others are hardwired for polyamory?...