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L-R: Jonathan, Kurt, Deo, Osang, Roni, our host Dawn, Edrie, Joel, Lord, Lee, Allan, Bubbles, Evan, Jessica.

We had so much fun at our Reading Group Discussion at Tin-Aw Art Gallery last Saturday, we’re going to do it again.

Those of us who had read not just Dune but also the sequels by Frank Herbert pointed out that Chapterhouse: Dune has sex scenes so badly-written, they may turn the reader off sex forever. This led to the general agreement that the next book we discuss should have well-written sex scenes.

Our nominees were:

A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter. It’s about a couple driving and boinking across France, and the prose is beautiful.

The Decameron by Boccaccio. Naughty, naughty stories from the Renaissance.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Explicit stream of consciousness sex among starving writers in Paris.

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki. Salaryman grooms a Western-looking girl to be the modern woman; she turns him into her bitch.

First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan. Nasty, perverse, brilliant short stories.

The choice: Ian McEwan’s first book. It’s short, but each of the eight stories administers a different kind of shock. It might still turn the reader off sex altogether, but the writing is awesome (as in How did he do that?). And if it’s too short and you want more, you can move on to McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden, his second story collection, In Between The Sheets, and his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers. They’re all nasty and perverse. (The books that follow are brilliant, but benign.)

Ian McEwan wrote these stories in his early 20s.

I was meeting many new friends, falling in love, keenly reading contemporary American fiction, hiking the North Norfolk coast, had taken a hallucinogenic drug in the countryside and been amazed – and yet whenever I returned to my notebook or typewriter, a savage, dark impulse took hold of me. Sibling incest, cross-dressing, a rat that torments young lovers, actors making love mid-rehearsal, children roasting a cat, child abuse and murder, a man who keeps a penis in a jar and uses esoteric geometry to obliterate his wife – however dark the stories were, I also thought elements in them were hilarious.

The next Bibliophibians Reading Group Discussion will be held on Saturday, 29 September, 4-6pm at Tin-Aw Art Gallery. Everyone is welcome, as long as you’ve read the book.