White Stains, Anaïs Nin

Image via WikipediaAnaïs Nin is something of a legend in soft core erotic literature. I remember finding her book on my father's bookshelves. I find most erotic 'literature' to be extremely boring and lifeless. Her stories are incredibly fresh (despite being decades older than I am), based on extremely interesting situations, which all have had a major impact on the development of my erotic psyche. Therefore, when I found the ebook, White Stains, on sale at Amazon.com for 99 cents, I was happy to pick it up.

Now, before I go any further, all of my real problems with this purchase have to do with the formatter who formatted this book. It's really awful. These are short stories which have no table of contents, no marking which one might fast forward to to find a favourite story, one must page through this book page-by-page rather than story-by-story or finding it in the table of contents and linking to it from there. This has got to be the worst ebook I've ever seen for this reason. Even to review it is a bit onerous. Imagine buying a paper book and not being able to navigate except by flipping every every page to get to it, one by one.

That said, as to the stories, they were not bad. There was one about deflowering a virgin which I wasn't terribly fond of, but it was still unique in situation. This gave it an interesting hue despite being in territory that isn't all that interesting to me. I'm not a fan of the deflowering erotica. The setup and buildup, however, are pretty erotic and it's well written.

Another story I liked was a story written in first person from the point of view of the sexual history of a man from the time of his youth. I enjoy it because it makes me think of my own situations which are still fresh in my memory.

Image via WikipediaThere is also an encyclopedia of f**king at the back which was interesting. Her reason for writing it was because she was not aware of any erotic literature that might be the basis of education for the erotic arts. I don't think she knew anything about the Indian Kama Sutra or the Japanese Shijuhatte. Thus, she decided to make one for people to study and read. 

I did not find this section particularly interesting. Also, she uses less than scientific terminology and more sort of the rough vocabulary more likely used by sailors. It's somewhat amusing, but I didn't find it particularly interesting, erotic, or informative.


Maybe it's worth the 99 cents. I guess it is. Ok, it is worth it for 99 cents. But, the formatter really made this book not-so-hot.