Fifty shades of blue rinse

23 September 2015 - 02:27 By Andrew Donaldson

If you read one book this week 'Make Me' by Lee Child (Bantam) R285The 20th in the Jack Reacher series, arguably the world's best binge-reading. Here Reacher, perhaps tiring of his bad-ass loner image, teams up with a female, former FBI private detective, and it appears a romance might be on the cards as they tear apart yet another small, nowheresville middle American backwater that has a lot of dark, violent secrets.The issueErica Jong introduced "zipless fuck" to the popular lexicon with her 1973 feminist classic, Fear of Flying. It is, as narrator Isadora Wing explains, a sexual encounter for its own sake: "It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not 'taking' and the woman is not 'giving'. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one."Jong has now written a sequel, Fear of Dying (Canongate), which depicts, with Flying's frankness, sex between older adults. Protagonist Vanessa Wonderman, a grandmother in her 60s, is terrified of ageing and death. She tries to escape her sexless marriage on a casual-sex site called zipless.com. Early reviews have been very positive."I've always wanted to write books for women that didn't yet exist, so I thought, I have to write about an older woman who is sexual, attractive and wants to reach out for life," Jong told the New York Times. "That's not celebrated, sadly, and I would hope that a lot of older women who read this book realise that sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms." Fear of Dying should be in stores in early November.Crash courseThe linguist David Crystal recently gave an after-dinner speech at a UK conference for indexers, editors and proofreaders in which he recalled advising Lynne Truss not to write Eats, Shoots & Leaves. "Nobody buys books on punctuation," The Guardian quoted him as saying. "Three million books later, I hate her."Crystal's latest, Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (Profile Books), is his own entry into this particular field. It is perhaps less pedantic and more sober than Truss's best-seller but it is the more useful work, as it encourages readers to think not only where the marks go, but why. In addition, it offers a fascinating, witty history of punctuation over the past 1500 years. Subeditors, take note...The bottom line"The people who know the least about business admire him the most, and those who know the most about business admire him the least." - Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by Michael D'Antonio (Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin's Press)..

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