A few people have commented on the bit in my bio which says ‘I only fuck people who love books,’ which I guess kind of surprised me. It was intended to be tongue in cheek, but actually it is pretty accurate too. Of the guys I’ve slept with, one was a friend from my degree course who loved French literature way more than me, one was an undergrad medic (probably involves quite a lot of reading?!), and one is the boy, who loves books so much that he often ‘borrows’ mine and never returns them. In fact, it’s getting to the point where I’m considering buying this.

That leaves two. One I slept with during freshers’ week, and after we’d had sex he showed me his lecture schedule to prove that land economists ‘do have to work hard!’ Yeah, not so sure about him on the book front. The other was so fleeting that I never even knew his name, let alone his thoughts on reading material, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was a book lover, too.

Anyway, the point is that much as it was intended as a joke, my love of books is not. I’m spending Christmas abroad and yesterday I was looking for somewhere to have lunch. There were a few places that I could have gone to, but I picked the one with an entire wall lined with used cookbooks which you could buy if you wanted to. Because how can a place with books be bad?

One of the great things about fucking boys who love books is that they often leave their books lying around when they’re cooking, showering, or otherwise engaged, which means massive potential for discovering authors and genres that you might never have stumbled upon if, like me, you tend to stick to what you know (Yes, I’m bad – if you have any recommendations, send them my way.)

But books are also what make it easier for me to connect with people who I might otherwise be intimidated by or feel that I don’t have that much in common with. Truth be told, people who are purely sex bloggers intimidate me, erotica writers less so. Sometimes, I think it’s easy to feel completely out of your depth when surrounded by people who know so much more about a subject than you do, but somehow, the fact these people like both sex and writing makes their knowledge less scary. Sometimes I think that erotica is a bad choice of genre for me – my spacial awareness is so bad that I often have people lying on each other’s arms to the point that they’d be more likely to have cramp than an orgasm.

But the good thing about being bad at sex logistics in my writing is that it just means that I have to read more, not only to learn about style, but also to work out where everything goes (yes, seriously!). And yes, although I didn’t mean it seriously when I wrote it, from now on it’s going to be true: if you want me to fuck you, you’ll need to at least pretend to have read a book.