365 Nights - by Charla Muller

My attention was drawn to this book a while ago. The idea of a couple setting out to have sex every night for a year was different, at least. I guess writing about it is either just as odd or inevitable, depending upon your perspective. Then I saw it at a bargain price as a Kindle e-book ...

First off, this is not a book about sex. We know how often they had sex, why they did it and how the author felt about it, but we are not privy to details of exactly what happened in their bedroom. I confess some slight curiosity, as "having sex" can mean different things to different people at different times, but we never find out.

The author takes the initial concept and uses it as a means to discuss numerous aspects of a woman's life in middle-class, 21st Century America. She uses "The Gift" as a thread through the story in quite an ingenious way. We learn a lot about her feelings and details of her life. For a man, reading about a woman's feelings is always an insight and this book is no exception. But this is also the flaw of the book - it is written purely from a woman's perspective. I would have loved to hear her husband's angle.

As it is, I think she makes two errors: First, she portrays sex as something that women deliver [maybe under sufferance] for men's pleasure. In my experience, it can and does work both ways. Second, she talked in terms of it being a challenge for her to "deliver" every night for a year and seemed to assume that her husband was blissfully happy with the arrangement. Perhaps he was. But, as a man, I would not want to receive this gift, as I would find the pressure to perform and the artificiality of the arrangement very off-putting.

Its faults aside, all in all I found this a good and enjoyable read and maybe I understand just a tiny bit more about how women see the world [or maybe I don't].