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Susan Quilliam's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Susan Quilliam recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Susan Quilliam's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Brokeback Mountain

Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece.

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.

Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent...

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Recommended by Susan Quilliam, and 1 others.

Susan QuilliamBrokeback Mountain is important to me because it’s the first time I’ve heard ordinary people in the street comment on a story focused on homosexual love—without distinguishing between it and heterosexual love. (Source)

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2

Chéri

Léa de Lonval is an aging courtesan, a once famous beauty facing the end of her sexual career. She is also facing the end of her most intense love affair, with Fred Peloux--known as Chéri--a playboy half her age. But neither lover understands how deeply they are attached, or how much life they will give up by parting ways. less
Recommended by Susan Quilliam, and 1 others.

Susan QuilliamThis is the book that gave me, as a young girl, an idea of an older woman’s sexuality. Although it has a very, very sad ending—I literally cried when I read it—interestingly, the message that I took away from it was not that at 49 you are too old to have a lover, but that you are absolutely not too old. (Source)

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3
A reproduction of the classic text, unavailable now for more than a decade, with a new introduction by the author. The Hite Report, first published in 1976, was a sexual revolution in six hundred pages. To answer sensitive questions dealing with the most intimate details of women's sexuality, Hite's innovation was simple: she asked women, a lot of them, everything--and published the results.
One hundred thousand women, ages fourteen to seventy-eight, were asked what they do and don't like about sex; how orgasm really feels, with and without intercourse; how it feels not to have an orgasm...
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Recommended by Susan Quilliam, and 1 others.

Susan QuilliamThe crucial thing The Hite Report does—and it’s a message that still hasn’t filtered through—is that it makes a very, very strong statement about the clitoris being vital to female sexuality. Hite radically changed the way we view sex. (Source)

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4
An essential exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works—based on groundbreaking research and brain science—that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy.

Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and...
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Recommended by Susan Quilliam, and 1 others.

Susan QuilliamIt’s one of the best books ever written, in my view, for guiding women in particular through the minefield of their sexuality in today’s world. (Source)

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5

The Joy of Sex

An international bestseller since it was first published in 1972, this updated edition brings this imaginative, uninhibited guide to lovemaking and sex to a whole new generation. It has been revised in such a way to retain Dr Comfort's original, revelatory advice while making it appropriate for the 21st century. less

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Kate FigesIt seems so innocent really now, all those daring explanations of S and M and positions, but it was before Aids and people were so optimistic. It was as though we’d discovered sex and free love. (Source)

Susan QuilliamThis was a seminal book. It not only reflected but created the sexual revolution. Even now, people who haven’t read it know what it’s about. (Source)

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