Summary from Goodreads:The literary education you've always lusted for.
Fresh from the virtual pages of Nerve.com comes this collection of "naughty bits," an irreverent look into the steamy, scandalous side of literature past and present. With bite-sized salacious excerpts from the classics -- new and old -- each with a fresh, insightful introduction, The Naughty Bits presents the world's great books as you never thought you'd see them.
Jack Murnighan is really good at creating lists of books to read. And very good at making these books sound fun. He came up on my radar with the publication of Beowlf on the Beach and I recently obtained a copy of The Naughty Bits so I could put together another "beach reading" endcap with a different flavor than the list called for in the master list for the store.
The Naughty Bits is a collection of Nerve columns and very much an overview of what Murnighan considers the "sexiest" scene from books ranging from Dante and the Old Testament to Kenzaburo Oe and Toni Morrison. As we all know, not all of us find the exact same things "sexy" so there were a few selections where I just didn't get it but. I really enjoyed the range and breadth of pieces Murnighan covered. I found a lot of books to add to the TBR (how did I never know about Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch before now?). The best parts of all these "bits" are his introductory commentaries. Great fun to read. I didn't like some of the language "modernizations" though, but that's just me.
Rumor has it that there's a second collection of columns titled Classic Nasty - unfortunately no longer available new so I'll have to check a few used outlets.
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