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  Fifty Shelves of Grey

  Fifty Shelves of Grey

  A Selection of Great Books

  Erotically Remastered

  Vanessa Parody

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Vanessa Parody, 2012

  The right of Vanessa Parody to be identified as the author of

  this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Author photo: Every effort was made to find the source of this photograph.

  Please contact the publisher if you have information on its provenance.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-238-6 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-227-0 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ‘If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books,

  don’t fuck ’em’

  – John Waters

  Foreplay

  Before the internet there were books, and before there was sex, there were sex scenes.

  As a girl, my entire sex education consisted of being told not to sit on a boy’s lap without putting a phone book on it first. My shoulders ached with carrying the Yellow Pages around in my handbag just in case.

  That all changed after a chance encounter with Jilly Cooper’s Riders – picked up mistakenly by this pony-mad teen. Talk about rude awakening! Within hours I was going through every book in my parents’ bookshelves looking for the dirty bits. Who amongst us has not balanced a copy of Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals on their palm to see if there’s a well-used place where it falls open? It is a rite of passage as familiar as staying up all night to watch a French film on Channel Four in the hope that two dreamy-eyed ingénues will go skinny-dipping together, or at the very least a fat philosopher with a moustache will bang a bored housewife on the kitchen table while she shouts out, ‘Mon Dieu, baise moi!’ (subtitled, coyly: ‘My God!’)

  In these less innocent days, all the vicarious shagging a girl could want is available at the click of a mouse, whether in full-colour live-action for home use, or in text downloaded onto a Kindle for discreet consumption on public transportation during one’s morning commute to one’s disappointing job in digital marketing. Erotic novels abound. One’s every fantasy is catered for in each hue of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

  But what of the sexually voracious reader whose tastes are of a more literary bent? The discerning onanist cannot survive on Anaïs Nin and Lady Chatterley alone. Yet even the most dedicated of bluestocking masturbators cannot be expected to trudge through the entire works of Philip Roth looking for the fleeting moments in which an elderly professor is fellated by an eager, illiterate lesbian.

  For you, I humbly offer Fifty Shelves of Grey – all your favourite books, from The Lord of the Rings to Winnie-the-Pooh, artfully condensed and erotically remastered, packaged into one volume, and ergonomically designed to be easily read with one hand.

  From literary masterpieces – Jane Eyre turns the tables on Mr Rochester; to modern classics – Philip Marlowe is a dick of a different kind in The Big Sleep; via philosophy – get intimately acquainted with your Kant; and self-help – the Fear gets well and truly Felt, and we Do It Anyway; with detours into science fiction – aliens and humans enjoy some entente très cordiale during The War of the Worlds; and even recipes – Nigella Lawson treats herself to some afternoon delight; this collection has something for every reader and every kink. So whip off your glasses, let your hair down and unleash your inner hot librarian.

  Vanessa Parody

  Contents

  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

  1984 by George Orwell

  The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkein

  Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

  Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers

  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

  Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

  Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

  The Art of Love by Ovid

  Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

  Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

  The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

  The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

  The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

  The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

  The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

  Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

  The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

  One Day by David Nicholls

  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

  Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

  Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

  E Void by G-org-s P-r-c

  The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

  Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

  A Socratic Dialogue

  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

  Dead Cert by Dick Francis

  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

  Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Cunnilingus by Immanuel Kant

  The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

  How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson

  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

  The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

  The Boden Catalogue

  The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges

  The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

  In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

  The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

  The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

  The Highway Code

  The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

  Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

  Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  1

  Jane Eyre

  by

  CHARLOTTE BRONTË

  There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, not for my Mr Rochester; for oh, how the tables had turned since first we met. Then I was but a common governess, and he my master, though he tells me now he was ever in thrall to me: not to my beauty, for I had always but precious little of that; but to my plain, honest ways, my fierce yet subtle intelligence, and to his certainty that, but for propriety, I should like to take him over my knee and give him a good, sound beating.

  Nowadays, when we talk late into the night – Mr Rochester attached to a cunning rack of my own devising, while I oftentimes tighten the screws – my beloved husband tells me of the madness in his first marriage to Bertha. For many a year he kept her incarcerated in his attic for his own dark pleasures – or so thought he; but these n
ever did fulfil him. He fancied himself quite the dominant man; never dreaming that he would be more at ease under the direction of a determined, if slightly short, woman. Thus did he continue for years, abusing poor Bertha to their mutual dissatisfaction, until he met me and thrilled to my inner steel. How well he understood me!

  Then, of course, came the terrible fire; and though my beloved was initially distressed by his blinding and the loss of the use of his arm & leg, he has now fully embraced the infinite kindness of the Lord’s gift in placing him so entirely in my power.

  So there was to be no walk, no matter how intense the beauty of the dappled vernal sunshine through the sycamores, nor how alluring the call of the swallows in flight. Instead, I bound my love prone on the conjugal bed – no need for a blindfold, of course; and I prepared my equipment with most thorough care. Mr Rochester has a weakness for my governess days, and so I deployed my cane most assiduously, for the good of his education, and savouring his every cry of delighted pain. Then even those dear sounds grew tiresome to me; so I stopped his screams with one of my stockings in his soft, wet mouth, and fetched the item which we have both come to love the most – a cudgel of sorts, but slim, and assiduously polished. This I greased with lard from the kitchens, and introduced it to the most sacred of places upon my husband.

  Reader, I buggered him.

  2

  Nineteen Eighty-Four

  by

  GEORGE ORWELL

  It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks reminded Winston Smith of tits. Ever since he’d been working at the Ministry of Sex – Minifuck, in Newspeak – everything reminded Winston of tits. Minifuck was in charge of enforcing family values, and on the walls of the towering concrete building – which, to be fair, didn’t remind Winston of tits, but of a huge, hard cock – were the three slogans of the Ministry:

  OBEDIENCE IS ORGASM

  CHASTITY IS CHOICE

  FIDELITY IS FUN

  As well as the omnipresent reminder:

  BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. And a symbol of binoculars.

  Winston sat at his desk in a pair of tight, pink EverySlacks, going through the newspapers with a thick black marker pen, looking for indecent images to obliterate. As he could never know what Big Brother would consider indecent, he had developed the perverse ability to see the erotic potential in almost anything, from atomic missiles to parrots. Winston went through more black marker pens than any other employee, and he feared being taken to task for his wastefulness almost as much as for indecency, but so far he had never been reprimanded, and indeed had three times been singled out and brought to the front of the Two Minute Wank for a round of applause, which was all the Two Minute Wank consisted of. They can’t see inside my head, thought Winston, as he blocked out a photograph of some shrimp cocktail. Until they can see inside my head I’m safe. But as far as he knew, the Thought Police didn’t have a Vice Squad . . . yet.

  Just then his supervisor, O’Brien, came over and leaned across the table. Winston inhaled his musk and felt an involuntary twitch in his cock. It’s O’Brien, for crying out loud, he told himself. His neck is wider than his head. And yet, something in O’Brien’s aura of brutal but intelligent authority couldn’t help but excite him.

  ‘Big Brother’s been watching you and your enormous black highlighter,’ said O’Brien. ‘You’re going to have to come with me.’

  Winston stifled a moan.

  He followed O’Brien’s taut, grinding buttocks out of Minifuck, into the icy air beyond. The two men did not speak, but when O’Brien led him into that most feared of all buildings, the Ministry of Love, Winston started to tremble, and not in a good way. How did they know his dark, depraved thoughts? Who had betrayed him? Was it that cafeteria worker who had such a sensual way of spinning his tortilla? Or was it just that only someone with an imagination as perverse as his could censor so many innocuous photographs?

  Their footsteps echoed down the corridors of Miniluv. Winston counted the numbers on the rooms as they passed. 99 . . . 100 . . . 101. O’Brien stopped.

  ‘Not Room 101!’ Winston wept.

  O’Brien looked around in surprise. ‘Who said anything about Room 101?’

  Instead, O’Brien unlocked the door to Room 102.

  ‘What’s in Room 102?’ said Winston.

  ‘Everyone knows what’s in Room 102,’ said O’Brien, pushing the door open.

  The room was dimly lit, with a lava lamp and a ‘Love is . . .’ poster. Winston heard the low hum of a saxophone, the seedy wah-wah of ‘Take Five’ on the tape recorder.

  ‘Remember, Big Brother is watching you,’ O’Brien told Winston, and he reached over and pulled him inside by his hardening crotch. ‘Big Brother likes to watch.’

  3

  The Lord of the Rings

  by

  J. R. R. TOLKEIN

  Frodo shook Sam awake and they set off to find Gandalf, for today was the day of the Great Council of Elronhubbard in which Frodo would finally meet the gathered Company of the Ring and reveal his Ring to them. They found Gandalf waiting in a shady glade beside a bubbling brook, tapping his foot impatiently.

  ‘There you are, young hobbits. Come, the Company are eager to see your Ring.’

  He led them to a clearing and there, seated on carved stone seats, were the elves, including a weird-looking one whose name was Legoland from Northern Merkinwood. There were also the dwarves, Groin and Gimlit, a man of Gondor and, of course, Elronhubbard himself, the lore-master.

  ‘Welcome, hobbits. This man is Boromir, I have bidden him join us for he has many questions about your Ring, plus, as you can see, he has a magnificent silver-tipped horn,’ said Elronhubbard.

  Frodo glanced down towards Boromir’s lap and saw that indeed his silver-tipped great horn was peeking out from his fur-lined cloak and lay upon his knees. He thought to himself, It is true, he has a great horn, but then I am in possession of a Great Ring. We shall make fine partners in the coming struggle. His thoughts were interrupted by Groin.

  ‘Frodo, you are in grave danger. Lord Sauron has heard tell of your Ring and he longs to possess it for himself. He sent word to us dwarves on Lonely Mountain that it is but a little Ring, the least of Rings, but still he desires it.’

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ said Frodo. ‘It is not “the least of Rings”, it is a Great Ring. It is tight, if that is what Sauron is getting at.’

  ‘Let us not quarrel,’ said Elronhubbard. ‘There is no question that your Ring is the Ring to rule all others. We are all bearers of powerful Rings but yours is the One Ring.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frodo. ‘I’m lucky to have good genes – I inherited my Ring from my uncle, Dildo Baggins. But I have taken great trouble to get it here intact so I would appreciate a little respect,’ he added, glowering at Groin.

  Boromir came and knelt before him, the head of his great horn brushing the grassy floor.

  ‘Frodo, no one disrepects your Ring. We are all here to honour and protect it from those who would wish to do awful things with it. I for one come to warn you of an old enemy of your uncle’s who still desires a Baggins’ ring for his own. You may remember him as Smeagol, but he likes to be called “Gollum” when he is naked, and he is naked most of the time. Fear not, I have imprisoned him.’

  ‘Meanwhile, the question is what shall we do with this Ring?’ said Elronhubbard.

  Groin grumbled, ‘I would like to see it first and be assured it is the Ruling Ring.’

  Frodo was shaken by a sudden shame and felt a great reluctance to reveal the Ring. But Gandalf nodded encouragingly and he took off his mithrel coat and stood naked before the company. He turned and bent to touch his toes. The company gasped. A golden glow came from the Ring. Elronhubbard approached and gently parted Frodo’s cheeks.

  ‘It has an inscription. Just as Isildur wrote in his account!’

  ‘Yeah it’s in ancient Elvish – it means “Follow your dreams”,’ said Frodo.

  ‘Er, no. It’s in my dialect,’ said Legol
and, peering into Frodo’s deep-cloven way. He read aloud the inscription. ‘Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbautl, ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-sihi krimpatul . . . Roughly translated it says, “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.”’

  ‘I’ll kill that bloody tattoo artist if I ever get back to the Shire,’ said Frodo standing up. ‘What else did Isildur say about me?’

  ‘He said your Ring was hot when he first took it, but then it seemed to cool and shrink but without losing either its beauty or shape. He also said it was precious to him though he bought it with great pain’

  ‘Ah, that’s nice. OK, shall we get on with this – can we all agree mine is the best Ring?’

  The Company of the Ring nodded and they set about honouring Frodo’s Ring. Gimlit suggested they turn out the lights or wear blindfolds for a more sensuous experience but in the end the lights stayed on and only he put on a blindfold. Boromir washed the Ring with water from the icy Silverlode spring in which had been steeped athelas leaves. Some were polishing their weapons in preparation: the spear of Gil-Galad, the sword of Elendril. Gimlit talked loudly about ‘preparing to rim the Black Gate of Mordor’, and Groin said he would ‘return the ring to Orodruin’s fire’, as he took a bottle of Tabasco from his tunic and shook a couple of drops onto his finger. Legoland meanwhile kept talking about ‘felching’, which Frodo could only assume was elvish for ‘beautiful’.

  4

  Fever Pitch

  by

  NICK HORNBY

  I never expected to score. Like my team, I was considered notoriously boring, although I did have a fully completed Soccer Star sticker album from 1968 and two spare Frank McLintocks from the same year, which I hoped might be enough to one day impress a football-minded girl into giving me a quick hand job between halves in the toilet at the Highbury Library, as our stadium was unfairly nicknamed. But I was resigned to going home from the nightclub by myself and manfully grinding one out in the style of the classic Adams, Keown, Dixon, Winterburn back four. No offence to Steve Bould, who was also key in that era.