In Beds

Perennial sources of enjoyment are few.  Enjoyment, in the main, is an annual: bursting into bloom one year, sere the next.  We will never have as much fun bowling as that first time; we will never be as blissedly stuffed; the lake will never shimmer quite so piquantly as now.

This is not to say there are no repeatable pleasures.  It's to say that experience, like dental anaesthetic, tends to deaden. We still feel it, whatever it happens to be; just not so hard, not so sharp.  (I lay to one side, for the moment, the particular pleasure of familiarity, that extra, shameful bounce in my step at  aerobics that is a direct result of a bad remix of "Everybody Dance Now.")

Perennial pleasures do exist, no matter their scarcity, and not the slightest of them is perusing, preferably whilst reclining, the two-line book summaries offered up by the NY Times Best Seller Lists. 

"A billionaire who needs a wife offers a one-year marriage in name only to a bookstore owner who must save her family home, but complications ensue."

Complications?  They ensue, you say?  What a brilliant twist on the old billionaire-wife-name-only-family-home story!

"Tiger, who has made it clear he will not take a mate, falls for a human female."

Because we are so foxy tasty!

"An inexperienced college student falls in love with a tortured man who has particular sexual tastes."


I'm fondest of the words "particular sexual tastes," as if the dude is a picky eater.   Garcon!  I'll have the dressing (down) on the side. 


"When a biblical scholar who makes an amazing discovery is murdered, his daughter hunts for the killer (and a missing document)."

Paper chase!

"Did Vincent Van Gogh Really Kill Himself?  His friends in the 19th-century Parisian art world set out to discover the truth."

A: Yes.  Done.