Halfway done with: "120 Days of Sodom" by the Marquis de Sade. Easily the grossest book I have ever read. I don't go out of my way to read gross books. I do go out of my way to read stuff that challenges me, and this book certainly is doing that. Laughing last night as I read some of it sitting in a Carl's Junior. It's my habit to read while eating (if I'm alone) and this is a pretty poor choice of book to read while eating. Almost barfed again last night. I'm laughing cause I remember this happening several times while eating and reading this book. It's not that the book itself makes me want to puke, it's the combination of reading it while eating. Like I said--pretty gross stuff...

Basically it's about four horny guys that hole up in a chateau in Switzerland with a bunch of old prostitutes, women, men and children. They've all either been kidnapped or paid to satisfy the warped desires of these four perverts. The bulk of the narration revolves around stories told for the titilation of the four "libertines". One of the old whores will tell a true story from her past and if it inspires the perverts, they'll act out what they've just heard. A laundry list of perversion is what it amounts to. Most of it sick stuff. As I recall he died in prison writing this. One of many sprung from the bastille during the french revolution, when the new government figured out who he was and what he was writing they quickly put him back in prison where he died.

Pretty tough reading. I remember trying to read it when I was a kid. I'd found it in the public library. Got about as far as where he starts enumerating the size of the four libertine's genitals--not very far.

I can only think of a few people who could handle reading it. Here are some excerpts from passages I found interesting:

"I have no need to thwart my inclinations in order to flatter some god; these instincts were given me by Nature, and it would be to irritate her were I to resist them; if she gave me bad ones, that is because they were necessary to her designs. I am in her hands but a machine which she runs as she likes, and not one of my crimes does not serve her: the more she urges me to commit them, the more of them she needs; I should be a fool to disobey her."

"Furthermore, beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity the extraordinary to the commonplace. Beauty, health never strike one save in a simple way; ugliness, degradation deal a far stouter blow, the commotion they create is much stronger, the resultant agitation must hence be more lively; in the light of all this, there should be no cause for astonishment in the fact that an immense crowd of people prefer to take their pleasure with an aged, ugly, and even stinking crone and will refuse a fresh and pretty girl, no more reason to be astonished by that, I say, than at a man who for his promenades prefers the mountains' arid and rugged terrain to the monotonous pathways of the plains. All these matters depend upon our tastes in this connection than it is in our power to alter the form of our bodies."

"The quatrains that evening featured certain sexual changes: that is to say, all the girls were costumed as sailors, the little boys as tarts; the effect was ravishing, nothing quickens lust like this voluptuous little reversal; adorable to find in a little boy what causes him to resemble a girl, and the girl is far more interesting when for the sake of pleasing she borrows the sex one would like her to have."

"...according to my belief, there is one essential thing lacking to our happiness. It is the pleasure of comparison, a pleasure which can only be born of the sight of wretched persons, and here one sees none at all. It is from the sight of him who does not in the least enjoy what I enjoy, and who suffers, that comes the charm of being able to say to oneself: 'I am therefore happier than he.' Wherever men may be found equal, and where these differences do not exist, happiness shall never exist either: it is the story of the man who only knows full well what health is worth after he has been ill..."

Kind of the cliffnotes version of the philosophical aspects of this book. For those who would be curious about some of the grosser parts I will excerpt a few of the descriptions--each of the participants are described at length. Be warned! I read this stuff to some of my friends and a few got mad at me. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! (hehe, as if this will stop you--just don't blame me...) If you're still curious after these copious warnings, click more below...

"Hairy as a satyr, flat-backed, with slack, drooping buttocks that rather resembled a pair of dirty rags flapping upon his upper thighs; the skin of those buttocks was, thanks to whipstrokes, so deadened and toughened that you could seize up a handful and knead it without his feeling a thing. In the center of it all there was displayed - no need to spread those cheeks - an immense orifice whose enormous diameter, odor, and color bore a closer resemblance to the depths of a well-freighted privy than to an asshole; and, crowning touch to these allurements, there was numbered among this sodomizing pig's little idiosyncrasies that of always leaving this particular part of himself in such a state of uncleanliness that one was at all times able to observe there a rim or pad a good two inches thick."

"Her ass, withered, worn, marked, torn, more resembled marbled paper than human skin, and its hole was so gaping, sprung, and rugose that the bulkiest machines could, without her knowing a thing, penetrate it dry."

"Her ass was peppered with wounds, and her buttocks were so prodigiously slack one could have furled the skin around a walking stick; the hole in this splendid ass resembled the crater of a volcano what for width, and for aroma the pit of a privy; in all her life, Therèse declared, she had never once wiped her ass, whence we have proof positive that the shit of her infancy yet clung there."