100 books like The Stud

Despite draft-stage admonitions from his great friend, the Jesuit priest Ronald Knox, the amount of sex Waugh layers into Brideshead Revisited is surprising for 1945: functionally heterosexual couplings, more given over to class imperatives of property, inheritance and trophy wives, and the tentatively homosexual (depending on interpretation), as located in the awakenings of young adulthood, as sluiced by wine, aesthetic beauty, cigars and Venice in Summer.

But it’s Venice and its architecture that’s the actual location of the full sensual awakening, triggering the protagonist’s eventual journey to Catholicism as he passes time among the Venetian stone of churches… and a fountain: “This was my conversion to the baroque...I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.” Eroticized Ruskinalia, finally stepping beyond the Anglo-Catholicism of the Oxford Movement.

This was only published way after Forster’s death–and I can quite see why: it would have whipped up a storm of unimaginable controversy with its story of homosexual love between two Cambridge students and then (steady yourself!) one of those students in later life and a rough-and-ready groundsman.

Forster wrote this in 1913/14, revised it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, died in 1970, and Maurice finally appeared in 1971. So the book, which concerns hiding, was deeply hidden for over half a century. Forster is sentimental in terms of love and brutal in terms of fate.

Love bucks polite society’s norms in the face of the danger of arrest, public scandal, and disgrace. But such love is so delicate and dangerous that any affront to it has to be met with the most decisive action to protect everyone involved–even if the price is loneliness and a life-long… show more.

This shamelessly self-regarding autobiography seems to have been a ghost-(re)written into a biography so that the author’s boasts are afforded a bit more credibility: “Harrison Marks is 40, reasonably good-looking, black hair, a black mustache, tanned and fit”; “His life is women, some of the most beautiful women in the world” etc.

Marks was the epicenter of the post-war British erotic revolution, moving from producing kitsch postcards of topless glamour models snapped in his cat-strewn Soho studios to the direction of truly dire British sex comedies (Come Play With Me is the best remembered), and with 8mm loops for home entertainment being churned out behind the scenes.

Disconcertingly, he often appeared in his work too. By the 1980s, he was reputed to be found, very refreshed, slumped in the corner of the film set while the others got on with the business at hand. This book comes from Marks’s… show more.

An accidental academic edge and idealistic, boosterish teacher lands Larkin’s non-entity protagonist in Oxford. Behavior degenerates from the tongue-tied comprehensive boy, ill at ease in the louche public school mob, to a fellow hearty and then a rowdy. After that, he becomes a stalker and gradually loses his marbles. Larkin has the protagonist write letters in the voice of the stalkee, Jill, and so imitate the assumed mindset of the innocent young girl primed for romance. Larkin would try something of this intimate interlocution again (passing himself off, as an author, as a retired headmistress) with his eroticized Enid Blyton-like novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s (dodging lesbian clinches with predatory older girls during late night Latin lessons in the dorms, frequent spankings from the headmistress, etc).

All this is brilliantly comic, proto-Angry Young Man and proto-punk, and counters the chilliness of post-war austerity with… show more.

I could pick any historical romance by Milan and feel happy giving it a spot on this list. Because Milan’s stories are deeply invested in exploring how social strictures and structures function to keep women in their “rightful” (i.e., subordinate) place.

In my favorite, Mark Turner has recently been knighted by Queen Victoria for his philosophical treatise, A Gentleman’s Practical Guide to Chastity, an honor that makes him a rock star to myriad young Englishmen. When a rival offers a reward to anyone who can prove she’s seduced the morally upright Mark, courtesan Jessica Farleigh takes up the challenge.

While Mark’s fans and neighbors find the virgin philosopher and fallen woman an appalling mismatch, Mark does not shy away from his attraction, simultaneously offering a witty yet biting critique of the double standard on male and female sexual behavior.

This book is one of my favorites because it features a strong independent heroine and a duke who decides to be a better man.

Cassandra has no patience with Ashmont—none. She is appalled by his behavior, and she isn’t afraid to tell him. He, on the other hand, is almost immediately smitten with her. It isn’t easy for him to change from a disgrace to a worthy partner, but he doesn’t give up—even when she plainly tells him she won’t marry him.

She threatens to murder him multiple times, and the fight scene with the umbrella is permanently etched into my mind. He might have been wrong about a lot of things, but he loves her exactly as she is.

I love books featuring strong chemistry between the two leads, and Nora and John’s chemistry leapt off the page. I also love series that have a strong family connection, and this is the first in a series with three sisters.

John enlists Nora’s help to uncover the identity of his birth mother, and this inspirational romance pulled on my heartstrings. I loved John, especially as he was the type of hero who was silent and impactful. The book was well-written and had enough scenes revolving around food to make me hungry. John and Nora’s story stayed with me long after I finished turning the last page. 

This book rose out of the grave and grabbed me by the ankles. I’ve always loved (and been completely terrified of) zombies. After 28 Days Later scarred me for life (that one scene with the crow and the blood ACK), zombies became somewhat of an obsession. But I always found myself wanting…more. Then this book shambled in my door, and suddenly, I had the twisted, funny, heartwarming zombie fairytale I never knew I needed in my life. It upended the undead genre, and I will love it forever for giving the mix of zombies and romance a big ole bear hug.

Enchanting, action-packed, and full of heart, this book is everything an urban fantasy novel should be. I picked this book up at a library sale, not realizing it was a later book in a series, but the story stood on its own and made me want to run out and buy the rest. The idea of magic families as corporations was unique and intriguing, and Andrews handled it beautifully.

The plot was tightly woven and intense enough that I had trouble setting the book down and blew through it in a few days. I loved the two main characters and their lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers backstory that set up just the right amount of heat for me.

I am a huge fan of Roshani Chokshi’s work—but she outdid herself with this book. The writing is thickly luxurious, and the House of Dreams, where much of the story takes place, feels like it sits at the borders of a fae otherworld. The magic is palpable. And deliciously foreboding.