Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I read this book during Banned Books Week. Most of it under my favorite tree in Delaware Park while Mark taught his Wing Chun class.

Oh yeah, the book. Yes, I enjoyed it, overall. I liked when the author wrote passages like this one…

“And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the re-assumed habit. Slowly, slowly the world to the soul begins to make itself feel, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after effects have to be encountered at their worst.”

I liked when the author was blunt. I enjoyed the relationship between the characters.

“Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy…Anything for a bit of warm-heartedness. But the women don’t like it. Even you don’t really like it. You like good, sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it’s all sugar. Where’s your tenderness for me? You’re as suspicious of me as a cat is of a dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love fucking alright: but you want it to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance.”

I didn’t mind the sex, although much of the time I feel it was unnecessarily crude. However I DID MIND the use of the term “John Thomas” over and over and over and over in the story. Ah! So THIS is where it came from? Lady Chatterly’s Lover? Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

“Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt, John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt o’ Lady Jane.”

Say cunt all you want, but say John Thomas, and I cringe.