 I really want to thank the group that put this together for this opportunity. I think we all secretly yearn to read the things we love out loud in public. And this gives us that opportunity and so I hope there are many more things that happen. The book that I chose was Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence. And I just think it's so cool that I get to read this out loud in public and in the public library. D. H. Lawrence I love for many reasons but it thrills me that it was banned on two continents at least. And then when it was first published in 1928 it was published by a private printer in Italy because they couldn't read English so they didn't know but they were publishing. And it was not published in its unexpurgated form until 1959 in the US and until 1960 in Great Britain. And it's a very, very important book in terms of opening up what can actually be printed and published in both America and Great Britain. So I'm going to read a part from the sort of beginning of the book where we're setting the stage. I think we probably all know the story. And we know that the book was banned because of its focus and its pretty explicit description of physical love and its uses of explicit terminology for women's anatomy and that's seriously why it was banned. And it's really the story of a physical relationship between an upper-class British woman who's married with a lower-class British man, the Gamekeeper-Mellorist. And the part that I want to read is really kind of just telling us a little bit about Constance who is Lady Chatterley and her sister and it sort of sets the stage I think. This is before Constance is married, it's before her husband is crippled in World War I and it's certainly before she meets Mellors. Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda have what might be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They have been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art and they had been taken also in the other direction to the Hague and to Berlin to great socialist conventions where the speaker spoke in every civilized tongue and no one was abashed. The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial. With the cosmopolitan provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals. They had been sent to Dresden at the age of 15 for music, among other things, and they had had a good time there. They lived freely among the students. They argued with the men over philosophical, sociological, and artistic matters. They were just as good as the men themselves. Only better since they were women. I'm not making this up. And they trapped off to the forest with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang twang. They sang the vulnerable songs and they were free. Free. That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forest of the morning with lusty and splendid throated young fellows, free to do what they liked and a bubble to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely. The impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment. Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love affairs by the time they were 18. The young men with whom they talked so passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in such freedom wanted, of course, the love connection. The girls were doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about. It was supposed to be so important. And the men were so humble and craving, why couldn't a girl be queenly and give a gift of herself? So they gave the gift of themselves. Each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing. The love making and connection were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anticlimax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards and a little inclined to hate him as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did girls life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connections and subjections. And however one might sentimentalize it, the sex business was one of the most ancient sordid connections and subjections. Poets glorified it for mostly men. Women had always known there was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more definitely than ever. The beautiful, pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They insisted on the sex thing, like dogs. Before she eats mellars.