sow the thought seeds

Love is … different things to different people. For some, it is about romance and poetry, to others it is unbound desire. The tension between spiritual and physical expressions of love is an apparent contradiction that dates back to medieval courtship. What better excuse to offer you both romantic and erotic literature this month … and other material that challenges these -- and maybe your -- boundaries.

How you love and who you love … like Marmite, it's a matter of taste. There is usually an other onto whom we project our desires. True even for the narcissist, although, as a J.M. Coetzee character says in Slow Man, every time he 'bent to kiss those inviting lips, the twin would dissolve in ghostly ripples' (Coetzee, 2005: 163).

Taste varies … historically and culturally … and, in this age of self-management, from individual to individual.  If love is about freedom of expression, it’s worth celebrating even if you definitely are not a Marmite person (though now there's Champagne-flavour Marmite, surely it’s time to experiment).

And whether you intend to enjoy your love vicariously, through the pages of a good book, or as the result of sending the book as a gift for Valentine's Day (which comes under the heading of seduction), you won't want to hang around. So these books are available exclusively at Buy it Now or Best Offer prices. No need to wait ten days for an auction to end, Buy it Now and your book will be in the post immediately and on its way to you.

The Other Love theme will run throughout February, after all -- passion shouldn't grind to a halt just because you've packed away your Valentine's card(s). 

By the way, if you are sending a gift to someone special, there is an option for gift wrap and shipping to the recipient of your choice, together with a personal greeting (see below for details).

I wish you all the love you deserve,

dene october

 Gift wrap option available 

The Edition is celebrating diversity this Valentine’s day, but the custom already has a diverse history. Two millennia ago, the Christian priest Valentinus was martyred after staging secret marriages. Chaucer shows us that Valentyne’s, in the Middle Ages, was more about when the birds and bees and ‘every foul … cometh … to choose his mate’. Up until the middle Twentieth Century, wintry Valentine’s Day was celebrated by English school children playing hookie for sweets and hot pennies. In the Twenty-first Century, it’s about love for an other -- or even others -- but perhaps Oscar Wilde had it right when he insisted, ‘To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance’. Time to treat yourself to some fine chocolates and kick back on the sofa … along with that book you bought yourself here, naturally.

Brothers deals with the rites of passage of a teenage boy who struggles with his own homosexuality through the revelation of his dead younger brother’s.  Whilst reading his brother's diary, the protagonist learns about his brother’s inner strength, both during his illness and in the admission that he is gay. The diary is a narrative mechanism for revealing both characters simultaneously to the reader, and a useful device for dealing with gay pride as well as denial. The surviving brother eventually learns not only to embrace life, but to accept the truth of his identity -- an identity his brother ironically built his own courage upon.

This is a children’s book, but one of those which lends itself well to adult reading.  Whereas, as The Observer stated in one review, children’s fiction tends to lie by omission, Brothers deals ‘with tricky subjects such as death, sexuality and family relationships’ without prettifying the emotions. The book ‘is hard as a bone and all the better for it’. I agree, but to be honest, I did get a lump in my throat towards the end of this one.

Ted van Lieshout, Brothers. Collins 2001. £2.34