Very little. That's the point.

Heh.

DH doesn't feel dated to me. Certainly not to everyone's taste (I think his writing was often overly-facile, his prose a touch purple when it goes for blue, and were you to add one final chapter to Lady C, I could see it shelved in romance fiction--it's got that sort of feel to it), but it doesn't feel dated.

No, some books date, some books come across like a snapshot, and some remain real.

I was wondering, in your opinion, which books you like now you thought would suffer a similar fate.

Is Jennifer Crusie still going to be sexy? Or that Anita Blake stuff? Is Emmanuelle still?

I don't know -- I suspect that Crusie won't, since she's very much talking about women right now, but not in a way that will carry its context with it into the future. It's been almost 30 years since I read Emmanuelle -- I certainly didn't know from sexy then, though I do still have vague memories of a certain dress.

I'm guessing that the body of chick lit is toast. All the issues that those young women are agonizing over are going to look like whether to roll your stockings and rouge your knees in forty years.

I was so disappointed to be bored by "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

Read it at 12 or 13. Then it's all racy and whatnot. Also in that age range, I read Anna K, Madam Bovary and I think Henry&June. It was...different. I should revisit them. After I plow through my current unreads.

I remember really hoping there was going to something nasty raunchy in Fanny Hill. With such a promising title ... I don't remember if I stuck it out. I was certainly disappointed.

I didn't think the legendary Dirty Pages in The Fountainhead were all that hot.

I read Fanny Hill for academic purposes. No, seriously.

As a grad student in history, I was going to write a seminar paper on popular attitudes toward pornography. Focused on FH. IIRC, wall to wall sex, described in baroque terms that didn't work right to the modern mind.

Actually, FH has a place in literary history. It (along with Tom Jones) is a prime example of the backlash against the first novels, which were very moral and taught girls to keep their honors so they could sell their virginities to the highest bidder. FH and TJ set that trope on its ear -- with heroes who ended well even though they didn't lead the most virtuous lives before marriage.

As Cindy said, Peyton Place is less shocking now than it was in its day simply because things that Simply Weren't Discussed back then now appear on Jerry Springer every day. But it's still a fun beach read. Ditto Forever Amber (the Publishing Scandal of 1944) and Valley of the Dolls.

PP was also made into a fun trashy movie starring Lana Turner. VotD was made into a movie that's a camp classic for reasons that escape me.

described in baroque terms that didn't work right to the modern mind.

Are you implying that a nine-year old Jamaican who couldn't even make sense of the pictures in Emmanuelle (it was the novelisation of the movie) might not get it?

Yeah, such was my conceit. I even started the Happy Hooker and got bored. Anything more subtle than Hustler was lost on me.

I can't stand DHL, but I don't know if "dated" is the word I'd use...that would apply that there was a time when his pseudo-profundities weren't completely ridiculous.