Language of love

♦ SWEET DREAMS (Juggernaut, Rs 199) by Sunny Leone promises its reader 12 "sexy stories" from the most popular former porn star, most famous bisexual, and most Googled person in India. What does the object of so many fantasies herself fantasize about? It seems reasonable to hope a woman of such singular experience could help answer the call of the writer William Gass, who wished, in his erotic treatise On Being Blue, for "a language which will allow us to distinguish the normal or routine f*** from the glorious, the rare, or the lousy one," lamenting that "we have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming."

Alas, Leone's men look "straight out of a Bollywood film", boasting "the perfect body" with "perfectly styled" hair; short of that, they are "a successful engineer with a good family". Likewise, her women display "ample breasts" and can't help but "giggle... like a schoolgirl". These stereotypes schtup each other with euphemisms, the men "exploring" "her most private parts", politely and vaguely "entering" their companions, who, at my count, "wrapped themselves around his waist" in 11 of 12 stories. There is vigour everywhere except where it counts - in the writing.

♦ FAMILY PLANNING: A NOVEL (HarperCollins, Rs 399) by Karan Mahajan, originally published in 2008 and just reissued following the success of the writer's second novel, heralds the arrival of an Indian Updike. Mahajan looks at a sunny city sidewalk and sees "light shot between the flat metal hoardings on either side like gunfire in an alley"; after a drink, he can taste "the gaps in his teeth nicely irrigated by tea"; he can smell, near a schoolgirl, "sharpened pencils and shampoo and face cream". Contemporary Delhi provides minutiae for Mahajan's precise observation, but the national capital also enables him to work on a larger scale. Family Planning stars Mr Ahuja, himself a planner of India's cities, as the minister of urban development, and of his own family, which includes his wife and 13 children. Like the novel's title, Mr. Ahuja's overpopulated, querulous family is a double entendre. "They were the reason he stayed in politics," Mr Ahuja thinks happily of his kids. "They sanctified his corruption and confirmed his charisma."

♦ HILLARY CLINTON FROM A TO Z (Sampark, Rs 350) by François Clemenceau takes up the timely assignment of informing the rest of the world about the life and ideas of (can we say it yet?) the next president of the United States of America. Clemenceau collects some illustrative details, for instance about Hillary's experience as a young woman watching Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a speech. His book, however, is also riddled with errors, such as a glaring mischaracterization of Hillary's minor role in a 1970 trial of eight Black Panthers. The book's gravest failure is its inability - shared by Hillary herself - to clearly state her worldview. We glimpse it in a quotation from her college thesis about Saul Alinsky, an anti-poverty activist who promoted civil disobedience. "The fight against inequality happens via politics," wrote a young Hillary in disagreement, "which has long been a means to gain power and enact programs that can make a difference."

♦ THE GEEK'S GUIDE TO DATING (Fingerprint Life, Rs 250) by Eric Smith, with recommendations as oddly banal as "connect with her on topics you're both interested in", can sound like a human etiquette manual for aliens. In fact, the only enlightening parts of the book are precisely those in which its "geeks" seem most like extraterrestrial beings. Thinking of the geekettes who play online multiplayer games, Smith warns that trust is "something that's earned, like when you fight with your allies in groups or raid parties. You need your teammates to heal you [and] cast protective spells." There's more romance here than in Sunny Leone's entire book.