This is a Roman book about two male lovers in Nero's time. Am giving it an 8 because it's well written, but very graphic.

This book is now on bookrelay.com in the "boyz" catagory.

Released on Friday, December 31, 2004 at about 3:00:00 PM BX time (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) at mailing to Elizabeth in Nashua, New Hampshire USA.

RELEASE NOTES:

Sending to Elizabeth who accepted it off bookrelay a long time ago. Sorry for the delay.
Enjoy!!!!!

The Satyricon arrived safely in today's mail; many thanks!

I knew that the Satyricon was incomplete, but hadn't realized it was quite so badly fragmented; portions of it were very frustrating, as if I were trying to figure out the plot of a mystery while somebody kept switching channels on me! [Though imagining what happened between one sentence fragment and the next was rather fun {grin}.] Compared to a lot of the books I read, this one wasn't particularly explicit or outrageous, but in places (and in between the lines) it did give some modern books a run for their money. It was also a lot funnier than I'd expected - in fact, I often found myself seeing the scenes in my mind - as if presented as a skit on "Monty Python"!

There was one fragment that took my breath away - a lovely thing, although its placement seemed odd: it appears right after a sequence in which our hero has been battling the curse of impotence via assorted cures, including witchcraft, and has at last been frivoling in the arms of a beautiful lady. I really wonder what happened in the deleted fragments leading up to this:

"The beauty of his body summoned me to love. Our lips, bruised by an endless rain of kisses, murmured our delight, while our hands, tangled with each other, wove and unwove every way of love, every caress. Then, binding our bodies together in one supreme embrace, our breathing so confounded on a kiss that we seemed a single soul..."

A footnote suggests that this passage was about Encolpius and Endymion - though the section is so fragmented I'm not sure how the author knows this. It's lovely, anyway!

[Edited to add a link to the amusing TV Tropes page on the book.]

Controlled release: I'm sending this to BCer nekki2976 in New York, to be included in an M-bag for the 2005 New Zealand BookCrossing Convention.

Arrived today.

Will be sending out in Mbag to New Zealand at the end of the week.

RELEASE NOTES:

Sending in an M-bag to FutureCat for the New Zealand Convention.

A huge sack of books arrived today - too late for the convention, unfortunately, but they'll still be greatly appreciated by the Christchurch Bookcrossers, and a few might end up travelling over to Australia for the Brisbane convention in June.

Many thanks Gory, and nekki!

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Picked up by another bookcrosser at this morning's breakfast meetup.

Picked up at the Christchurch Bookcrossers breakfast meetup this morning, thinking it was a worthy classic - hadn't realised it was a gay classic! Should be something a bit different.

I've hung on to this book for too long and haven't read it. Time to let it go.

RELEASE NOTES:

On the bookshelves.