What's the Most Erotic Book You've Ever Read? Each week in Bookends, two writers take on pressing and provocative questions about the world of books. This week, in our Sex Issue, Anna Holmes and Francine Prose discuss the most erotic books they've ever read. By Anna Holmes "Forever . . . " - not for the sex, but for its portrayal of carnal desire from a teenage girl's point of view. Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson Anna Holmes In 1985, one decade, tens of thousands of copies and multiple book bannings after its publication, I came into possession of Judy Blume's novel "Forever. . . . " The book, an account of an adolescent love affair, was incendiary from the beginning: derided by groups of concerned parents and religious organizations, it has regularly appeared on American Library Association lists of the most banned and challenged books, and was accused of being devoid of "any aesthetic, literary or social value" by a school district in Iowa. My copy, a gently worn edition with a gauzy cover illustration of a locket and a slightly melancholy blonde, was lent to me by my friend Rachel, which is to say it had been spirited away in a low-tech but high-anxiety operation to a spot beneath the pillow of my water bed (remember, this was the "80s). I was 12 years old. "Forever . . . " - annoyingly precious ellipsis and all - is the story of a 17-year-old girl, Katherine Danziger, and her six-month love affair with a fellow high school senior, Michael Wagner. It's about first love, but it's also about sex: Katherine has a close, functional family, an interest in tennis and a carnal curiosity that eventually finds expression in her relationship with Michael, to whom she loses her virginity. Although not particularly graphic in its depiction of intercourse - readers remember the corny name bestowed on Michael's reproductive organs better than the sex itself - the book, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies, remains, for better or worse, one of the most memorably erotic novels I've ever encountered. Let's be clear: I was 12. The sexual narratives we absorb in youth are formidable, formative. Also, it's subjectively difficult to say what distinguishes the "erotic" from the purely pedestrian: although Webster's defines the word as "of or arousing sexual feelings or desires," what, exactly, is deemed arousing changes from year to year, if not from moment to moment. Twenty-eight years after I first read "Forever . . . " - and in a raunchy cultural climate in which books like the over-the-top "Fifty Shades of Grey" are devoured and giggled over by young and old alike - it feels misleading to laud the book for its stimulative, squirm-inducing effects. Still, despite (or because of) its avoidance of in-your-face salaciousness, "Forever . . . " remains a potent and arousing little work. Unlike the racier, more graphic sexual set pieces in Blume's adult fiction, "Forever . . . " seems far more fascinated by the power of suggestion than explication, more curious about sexuality as the possibility, rather than the completion, of something. Put another way, "Forever . . . " is erotic not because of the intercourse, but because of its portrayal of what comes before that act, namely, the delicious choreography of physical courtship that used to be called "heavy petting" but is now commonly described as "foreplay." It is meaningful - revolutionary, even - that this intimate dance of physical exploration was presented from the point of view of a young woman. For all the accolades heaped on Blume for dealing "frankly" and responsibly with sexuality (her characters talk about their needs and wants; they buy and use birth control), her novel's primary, perhaps more controversial impact comes from its celebration of adolescent sexuality via the first-person female. For those of us who came of age in the AIDS-anxious, post-second-wave 1980s, extracurricular education about human sexuality focused on the female form: the nudie magazines and racy college comedies that introduced us to sex were populated by the voluminous breasts and carefully groomed pubic mounds of a million heterosexual male fantasies; young women were the observed, not the observers. Blume took this sense of curiosity and desire, this male gaze, and upended it, making it legitimately, unapologetically female. For those of us who treated the book as a sexual talisman, Blume's description of Katherine's first glimpse of an erect penis was alone worth the price of admission. Behind that innocent-seeming girl on the cover of "Forever . . . " was a human being for whom the pursuit of pleasure was a potent force - as vital and acute as that felt by any young man from "Porky's." Anna Holmes has written for numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Harper's, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker online. A 2012 recipient of the Mirror Award for Commentary, presented by Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Journalism, she is the editor of two books: "Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters From the End of the Affair" and, to be published later this month, "The Book of Jezebel," based on the popular women's Web site she created in 2007. By Francine Prose As a child, I was mystified by the Sodomites asking Lot to bring out the visiting angels so they could "know" them. But I knew it was hot. Francine Prose