In other words, erotic novels are fun, they're sexy, and they can be prestigious. I mean, where else could you find hot billionaires, rugged war heroes, professors that don't mind giving you a "D" (jokes!), or actors who are just as hot on the screen as they are off? Nowhere but NSFW stories! If you're a newbie, welcome to one of the hottest genres on the planet, and if you're a returning reader: welcome back, we missed you! Here are some of the best erotic novels that will leave you seriously blushing and maybe, just maybe, needing a cold shower afterward.
good dirty books to read
Get this: a psychologist goes on tour with one of the hottest bands in the world and has to keep it professional. As they travel across the country, she starts to fall for the lead singer, and one thing leads to another. Get ready to blush, like, a lot.
If you like your erotic fantasy with an extra dose of fantasy, the vampire-heavy Black Dagger Brotherhood series is can't-miss. The series is regularly name-dropped in lists of books with the hottest sex scenes and this New York Times best-selling series has 19 entries and counting to keep your blood flowing primarily below the waist.
A hot professor by the name of Gabriel Emerson falls in love with his graduate student Julia Mitchell, even though it's forbidden. (Does this troupe ever get old? The answer is no.) Hardcore fans deem it as the professor and student version of Fifty Shades of Grey, so you know we had to spread the word.
Arguably the best thing about the Netflix series Bridgerton was how it started out like a lush, innocent romp through estates and high society and marriageable men and women and then, out of now, BAM! Some of the steamiest sex scenes we've ever seen on TV. So why not read the series of novels that inspired those scenes, and start here: The Duke and I is about naive young woman who gets married off to a tempestuous Duke who loves her and, in return, teaches her the ways of love.
Another first of a series, The Court of Thorns and Roses follows a woman who slays a wolf and, as revenge, is kidnapped by a horrible fairy who takes her to his realm as a captive. But when she finds out that sometimes he's actually a hot guy, she starts to have some complicated feelings. Feelings that she cannot help...explore. You get it. File this one under fantasy erotica and get ready to be transported.
The Duke Heist by Erica Ridley is $1.99! This is book one in a new series and was mentioned on a previous Hide Your Wallet. Elyse was super excited about the heist element and I feel like the other books in the series have been talked about positively here.
Bondage....Dom/sub relationships.....Doctor visits....All that and more in here, and you will not be disappointed by what you read, i assure you. PLEASE NOTE: While the situations may suggest otherwise, none of these characters are blood related or minors.
We were watching our favorite dirty late night show on HBO, when the clock striked 12. We both knew what happened to our bodies and minds when the clock strikes midnight. It was only a matter of time before our inner selves came out.
While most readers handled an area of the page near the outer corner, not everyone did. Apparently, the habit of reading a particular prayer book was also coupled with a habit of holding the manuscript in a particular way each time. The owner of the Brussels prayer book mentioned above did not hold the book at the outer corners, as most owners of octavo-sized manuscripts did; instead, she held it open near the gutter (fig. 11 and fig. 12).6
I also accounted for the varying darkness of the vellum. To use the Wetzlar, I zero the scale on a part of the vellum that has not been intensively handled, then take a reading from the same page, at the epicenter of the dirt, and record the result (fig. 14). The X-Rite, on the other hand, does not have a zeroing feature, and I therefore take a reading from the epicenter of the dirt and subtract a reading from a clean part of the same page, which in effect, achieves the same result as zeroing the scale (see fig. 15). In this way, I can account for the darkness of the vellum and subtract it from the value of the dirt.8 Experiments revealed that the darkness of the left and right sides of an opening have readings within five percent of one another; I therefore took only a reading from the recto side of each opening and plotted these numbers in a spreadsheet, where each row number corresponds to a folio number (fig. 16). Arrayed in this way, the data easily generated a graph of usage (fig. 17). The densitometry values show the relative degree of handling of the various folios and sections of each manuscript.9
The graph reveals that the reader spent the most time with the Hours of the Virgin and considerably less time with the Hours of the Cross, where the total area under the curve is a fraction of that for the Hours of the Virgin. A closer look at the shape of the graph corresponding to the parts of the Hours of the Virgin reveals that the graph drops off considerably at the end, indicating perhaps that the owner often fell asleep before reaching compline, the seventh and last of the canonical hours.
It is difficult to say whether the owner of this book of hours was a layperson or a member of a religious order. The manuscript has a calendar and other features that suggest it may have been made at the Franciscan convent of St. Ursula in Delft. It is reasonable to assume that regardless of the exact identity of the owner, he read the book with the intent of achieving comfort about the state of his soul.
Like the owner of the Delft book of hours in the previous example (The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Ms. 74 G 35), she revealed a penchant for the prayer Adoro te in cruce pendentem (fig. 34). The edges of this text are strongly discolored. Reciting this prayer would have earned thousands of indulgences for the reader. The other heavily used text in this manuscript was a prayer to the Trinity (fig. 35), which corresponds to a spike in the graph, Late medieval votaries turned to the Trinity for personal protection, and several examples below will demonstrate the depth of this belief.
Each folio in this book of hours reveals a slight darkening from repeated handling, demonstrating that the book was indeed used as an instrument of prayer over a period of time (fig. 43). The densitometry graph for BMH 64 reveals that the first or early owner used many of the texts in the manuscript. He or she read the Hours of the Cross approximately as frequently as the Hours of the Virgin, consulted the Hours of the Sorrows of the Virgin less frequently, and spent the most time with the Vigil for the Dead. The Vigil, in other words, is the text corresponding to the greatest area under the curve, and the edges of the manuscript folios in this section are visibly worn (fig. 44). Augustinian canonesses were remunerated for reading the Vigil on behalf of the dead in Purgatory, and it is possible that a canoness wrote and decorated this manuscript then subsequently used it to perform her duties.
In sum, the densitometrical evidence and other internal evidence within the manuscript suggest one of two likely scenarios: either an Augustinian canoness at the convent of St. Agnes in Delft read the Vigil for the Dead intensively, because doing so was part of her duties; or a member of the Oem family of Dordrecht incorporated the manuscript into their tradition of honoring their ancestors.
He was not, however, illiterate, as the densitometry graph also reveals significant areas under the curve at the gospel readings, which begin, unusually, with an image of the Annunciation (fig. 49), as well as at the suffrages and the prayers for communion. Text pages in all of these sections have been darkened with use, indicating that the owner had a sustained involvement with these texts. Within these sections, he also revealed some of his favorites, for example the suffrage to Saint Erasmus, which was considered to be apotropaic (fig. 50). (This text was also a favorite of the owner of Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Germ. Oct. 6, as discussed above.)
The graph would suggest that he frequently turned to the Hours and Mass of the Virgin, reading just the beginning of the text then concentrating on the images. Not all of the images held his sustained attention, however. One of the low points on the graph corresponds to the image representing the Visitation, that is, the meeting between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth when the two women were pregnant with Jesus and John the Baptist, respectively (fig. 51). Whereas convent sisters performed prayers and plays and commissioned sculptures based on this event and might have been expected to hold this image in esteem, the male owner of this manuscript took no more than a passing glance at it.
The densitometry graph for a book of hours made in South Holland, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Ms. 133 E 17, on the other hand, reveals that its user spent the most time with the Hours of the Virgin (fig. 56). Like the reader who used Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Ms. 74 G 35, discussed above, this votary did not always stay awake long enough to read compline. The sharp see-saw tendency of this graph is probably a result of the rather rough vellum on which it was written, resulting in a remarkable difference between the hair and the flesh sides of the vellum, so that the dirt is much more likely to get trapped in the velvety flesh side, causing it to darken more quickly.
First, the examples I have chosen were made in the late fifteenth century, a period when the practice of prayer was changing rapidly. I believe that most of the heavy wear in fifteenth-century books of hours comes from the original owners because such intensive use reflects the fact that people did not want old prayer books or service books in Latin: they discarded books that were out of date, written in languages and scripts they did not understand, and acquired and used instead new books that included fashionable prayers. Old manuscripts often ended up in the hands of binders who used them as padding or structural material. This practice was so common that there is even a word to describe such a recycled fragment of parchment: maculature (fig. 66). 2ff7e9595c
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