Cake Wrecks

I was so sad to hear that I wouldn't be in town when one of my favorite blogs visited my local indie bookstore for a signing. To help me get over this loss I've decided to post some of my favorite entries. The blog is Cake Wrecks and they've got a new book out which literally had my tearing up I was laughing so hard. The premise is simple: funny or weird cakes. Intrigued? I thought so.

Classic break up cake. You almost gotta respect someone who dumps you like this. At least they left you something to eat while crying.

I hope the cake giver wasn't also the herpes giver.

Now, you may be thinking, these cakes don't have anything to do with sex or naked dudes. And those above don't. But there are some PoolBoy related cakes. Oh yes, there surely are.

Semi-nude dude on a bearskin rug? That's pretty fucking PoolBoy.

And finally, the icing on the PoolBoy cake (har har)....

What's that apostrophe about?

Also, I want one of these at the launch party.

Hot Guys Reading Books

There's pretty much nothing hotter to me than an attractive dude reading a good book. Blamo! My undies are instantly wet. Srsly. It's pretty much the reason I work at a bookstore. Yes, I love books and I love to talk about them but really I love to flirt with hot dudes who ask me for recommendations or just ogle them while they flip through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Whoa is right.

So when my friend sent me a link to Hot Guys Reading Books I almost fell out of my chair. And then I spent a long, long time looking through it. There's a little sampling below to wet your whistle.

I don't even care what the book is. Hello!

Obviously European, no? Wish I could tell what he was reading.


That's a saucy little smirk, my friend. I like.

Loafers! Would totally approach this dude and strike up a convo about whatever he's reading. Hope it's not Eat, Pray, Love.

HGRB says he was reading a Harry Potter book. Get in my pants!

Heinlein, nice. You can be a stranger in my strange land any day.


Check out the blog and send in pics of your boyfriend reading so I can fantasize about him too.

For my Bookish PoolGirls

I've had jobs before where, when there's downtime, the lowly staff entertains themselves by watching music videos on YouTube, planning and detonating corn bombs (only fellow detasselers should understand that), or what have you (I once carved the JFK assassination into a pumpkin for a Halloween contest at work, just saying). Wanna know what bookish types do when it's slow at bookish jobs? Try looking through the hilarious lists on GoodReads (it's like Facebook for book nerds). Compiled by pool girl Laura, who loves to quote Spring Breakdown to me all the live long day, below are some of the best GoodReads user-created book lists.

First we have "Hottest Guy on a Cover." That one is pretty obvious. Most of the books look like romance novels and, surprisingly, there are lots of books about the Beatles. What I don't get about this list though, is why you can't see almost all of these hot cover dudes' faces. I suppose these could also be contenders for "Dude, Where's My Forehead?"

Next we have lists made by horny women. There's "Characters You Most Want to Sleep With," which obviously has Twilight's Edward Cullen in the top spot. Now, I'd bang R-Patz every which way, but the character Edward Cullen? I'm outing myself as a nerd here just by admitting I've read the atrocious Twilight series, but really Goodreads ladies? You'd like to bang a dead dude who is 100 years older than you, has killed people and probably wants to kill you, is rock hard like a statue (and not just downstairs!), and is given to stalkerish behavior like watching girls sleep, telling them who they can and cannot hang out with, and verbally belittling their intelligence and decision making skills as well as being prone to bouts of uncontrollable rage? Nice pick. Unfortunately, most of the "horney lady" lists are about paranormal romance (see JR Ward and Charlaine Harris) or teen romance (see Shiver). What are red blooded, adult, intelligent, independent women reading? My guess is they're not on Goodreads because they're too busy reading the PoolBoy blog!

Finally, we have an assortment of lists about gay male characters. There are a ton of these. From "Best Gay Furry Lovers" and "Worst Gay Book Covers" to "Best Gay Cinderfellas," Goodreads is innundated with lists about gay men. Where are all the lists about books full of straight male characters? There are some (yes but they're all about Edward Cullen!) but nothing like the number of lists about hot gay characters. Just like in the search for porn for women, straight ladies always seem to get the shaft (haha!).

There are some lists to make your downtime at work fly by. Check them out and get reading!

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

A couple weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the Chelsea Handler show at the Dodge Theater in PHX (for free nonetheless!). I've been a fan of Ms. Handler since seeing her TV show Chelsea Lately. The lady is quick. She always gets the last word and usually that word is pretty hilarious. She's got a new book out, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (and yes, I just linked to GoodReads, fuck that huge online bookseller that pushes indie bookstores out of business), from which much of the material at her live show was based.



A girl after my own heart, Ms. Handler went on a huge spiel about how gross balls are ("I can understand wanting to get fucked but who goes out thinking, 'I can't wait to get my mouth around some balls!'?") and then reenacted discovering "the feeling" at her first sleepover at age 8. How can you not love a woman who learns to masturbate at 8 but thinks she's the only one that knows about this magical power and so has the inside balls to do it at the dinner table?

If you get a chance to see Ms. Handler on the road I highly recommend it. Otherwise just read the book, or her collection of one night stands, My Horizontal Life.

Vampires give me a Boner

If you've been reading the PoolBoy blog at all you are probably aware that I'll use any excuse to post pics of R-Patz. NPR recently offered me another opportunity when they wrote this Bloody Book List. And it's not just a vampire reading list (though there is a pretty good one at the end), but an article about how one can know what's happening at a certain point in history by checking out the vampire lit of the time. Don't believe me?

Take Bram Stoker's Dracula.

"It was written at the end of the 19th century, at a time when England had some of the largest ports in the world," says Benita Blessing, who teaches modern European history at Ohio University. "Here you have a ship arriving from Eastern Europe, bearing soil from another country, and a plague-like person who is going to bring death and destruction. The concerns at that time were foreign illnesses, unwanted immigrants. What Dracula is about is the fear of what we might today call globalization."

That's just the first example. The article discusses Anne Rice's vamp novels, Whitley Strieber's The Hunger, and the current wave of blood sucking books like Mormon Meyer's Twilight series and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels

So what does the recent infatuation with deadly immortals tell us about the national subconscious today? Well, in both Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse series the main vampire characters try to deny their animal instincts and be more moral, in an attempt to be more human. Vampires, even Sookie's Bill Compton, are predators, but then again, so are humans. Dracula wasn't concerned about mainstreaming or following a set of moral rules. So why does Edward Cullen care about weather he drinks the blood of an animal or a human?

Apparently it's because humans are killing the Earth and we feel really bad about it. According to Whitley Strieber:

"Our prey is our planet," he says. Today's fear is not the Cold War or AIDS, it's the fate of the Earth: "We sense that there is something wrong with the environment, that the planet itself may not be able to sustain us very long, and so we are beginning to romance death once again."

I buy it. It seems that vampires, who usually represent fear of death, appear in literature to reflect what the major fear of the time is, from immigration, to disease, to the uncertainty at the end of the Cold War, to pollution. If you are into vampires or how literature reflects culture and what's happening in the world, this article is a must read.

I'll leave you with a little Eric from True Blood to get you through the day.



Have a good Tuesday, biznatches.

Clit Lit

I'm really tired of hearing about "Chick Lit" and seeing pink and turquoise book covers sprinkled with sparkling wedding ring graphics. I make no judgments about the contents of these books as I've never read any myself. I am more into what I like to call "Clit Lit," juicy novels that talk about sex from a woman's point of view, realistically. That is, books that are not obviously written by men or subconsciously teaching women that marriage is the greatest thing we can hope for. Personally, I would rather have some fapping material so I can hope for really great sex. So, in honor of swollen clits everywhere, I introduce the first list of books that will make your panties wet wet wet.

1. The Bride Stripped Bare - Nikki Gemmel

Originally published with an anonymous byline, Gemmel tried to keep her name hidden because this book is DIRTY. Someone found out who the author was a leaked it to the Australian press and now you can find copies with Gemmel's name attached. My friend A found this book in an indie bookstore in New Town, Sydney and locked herself in her dorm room for 2 days to read the thing in one sitting. In the tradition of junior high girls gleefully smuggling dirty books between every 7th grade female, A then passed the book to me and I consumed it in a single sitting as well. The Bride Stripped Bare is about a new wife who finds out something suspicious is happening between her husband and maybe her best friend so she sets off to discover her own sexuality with a hot spanish lover, teaching him how to make love and do all the things she could not do with her husband. The book is dirty. So dirty I feel like I should keep it under my mattress instead of on my bookshelf. I would give it five out of five swollen clits for maintaining an interesting plot while being filthy, if I had a rating system.

2. Anything by Erica Jong

Seriously, this lady loves to talk about sex. Fear of Flying is the book that made her big and forever attached the "zipless fuck" idea with her name. Her first autobiographical "novel" is about an independent young woman deciding if she wants to stay in her marriage or have hot sex with smart older dudes. It's an interesting read but if we're going for more actual hot sex I prefer Any Women's Blues, the story of a successful artist who is in an obsessive relationship with a hot younger dude. The artist tries her best to get over and away from her hot boy toy but the sex is hard to leave. She does find some comfort boning an Italian hottie in Venice but his ice princess wife makes that hard. Lots of sex. Very hot. Jong has other books that I need to read and rate for their boner factors which just means there's more clit lit to come!

3. Delta of Venus - Anais Nin

My first masturbation material, I found Delta of Venus in my parent's bookshelf and hid it by my bed only to be discovered years later when my parents moved. The book is a collection of sexy stories about young hot Europeans sexing each other. I remember having to skip through a lot of the build up to get right to the good stuff. Nin puts a bit more finesse on her writing than a common smut peddler but readers can still tell her stuff is pretty much pornographic. I also have Henry & June, which promises to be very clit-tastic if the movie version if any indication, sitting on my shelf ready to be devoured next.

4. Memoirs of a Beatnik - Diane di Prima

One of the few female beatniks to produce their own artistic output versus being a muse, di Prima hung out with all the big names that young people now worship like Gods. Even better, she fucked a lot of them too. When I first started reading this book I was all, "oooh, this is hot." But as I kept going I realized that was pretty much all it is. Which makes sense when you learn that when di Prima turned in rough drafts she received them back with "MORE SEX" written in big red letters across her words. If you're looking for some insight into female members of the Beat movement, I suggest Joyce Johnson's amazing Minor Characters or perhaps some of di Prima's other stuff like Dinners and Nightmares. However, if you're looking for unadulterated sex sex sex, this if the book for you.

5. Forever - Judy Blume

This is a great book when you're young and new to sex and relationships. Forever is the story of a young girl's first real relationship and sexual experiences. It doesn't shy away from the confusion and pain related with the first time you have sex and fall in love, but it also talks realistically about how it feels to be a young woman experiencing so many firsts. I had heard about this book for a long time before I got around to reading it. My freshman year of college I trekked out to the Boston Public Library, wondered into the young adult section, found this book, found a chair, and sat there for a couple hours reading the novel from front to back. I wish I had read it earlier but I still think all women should read it sometime in their lives. The sex is not super hot but when you think of having sex for the first time with the first person you ever loved, it's pretty good. Buy this book for your little sisters and nieces.



That concludes our first Clit Lit round up. There are always more books to read and reviews to write. Can you think of a book that really gets your juices flowing that isn't a collection of erotica? Recommend it here!