I’m Aoife Bhreatnach, historian and avid reader. I’ve written a serious history book and a not-so-serious history blog but my first passion is literature. As a precocious child-reader, I sometimes read the wrong book at the wrong time; ten-year-old me could not understand why ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ was controversial or even good.
I want to read banned books for the smut, to discover what famous authors like Simone de Beauvoir and mass-market writers like Orrie Hitt have in common. All literature infamous for indecency in the English-speaking world was banned in Ireland but the Irish banned list contains many books freely available elsewhere. It’s a smutty book list and I want to read all that smut.