6) The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

I put this onto my Blackberry as an e-book for some reason, roughtly about the same time I discovered it was the top UnSuggestion for Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End.

Set in the sultry New Orleans of 1899, it is the story of Edna Pontellier’s attempt to liberate herself from a stifling conventional marriage and choose between the two men who are interested in her. I was enjoying it until quite near the end, when my eye fell on this gruesome sentence:

He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature’s requirements like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom.

At this point my Serious Hat fell off, and I started wondering (and debating with my wife and brother-in-law): Can a blossom be torrid? Can a blossom be torpid? Can a thing which is torrid also be torpid? Is it actually a rather complex and obscure metaphor for oral sex?

(This then led to telling my brother-in-law about Thog’s Masterclass.)

After that I began hoping against hope that the heroine would choose one of her two potential lovers rather than kill herself a la Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. Alas, my hopes were dashed.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: Peopleware: productive projects and teams, by Tom DeMarco. Rainbows End comes in at #13.