BOOKS BOUGHT:

• Open Marriage: A New Life—Nena and George O’Neill
• Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny—Nile Rodgers
• Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds—Lyndall Gordon
• Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages—Phyllis Rose
• The Last Word—Hanif Kureishi

BOOKS READ:

• The Last Word—Hanif Kureishi
• Nameless Novel—Anonymous
• Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion—Robert Gordon
• A Song for Issy Bradley—Carys Bray

This column always begins with a list of books I have bought and a list of books I have read, but the main body of the text, for obvious reasons, tends to relate to the latter list. I wish this were not so, for obvious reasons. But the confidence of my youth has ebbed away: these days, I seem to have much less to say about books I know nothing about. This month, however, there is a title on the Books Bought list that requires explanation, even though I suspect nobody will believe a word of it, not least because I can no longer remember what the explanation is. I was under the impression that I’d bought Open Marriage, by Nena and George O’Neill, because I’d recently read an obituary of Nena and it had piqued my interest, but she appears to have died in 2006, so that can’t have been it. I did read the obituary, but I can’t recall why.

Whatever. I somehow learned that (a) Open Marriage was published in 1972 and spent forty weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, (b) just three of the original book’s two hundred and eighty-seven pages deal with the subject of monogamy, and (c) only one or two lines in those three pages seems to suggest that monogamy may not be as essential to marriage as had hitherto been supposed. “We are not recommending outside sex,” the O’Neills said, “ but we are not saying that it should be avoided, either. The choice is entirely up to you.” This is hardly incendiary stuff, and some disgruntled book-buyers might have pointed out that the choice had been entirely up to them even before they’d coughed up for a hardback. And the rest of the book seems pretty mild, too. It advises married couples that they should have friends, and separate interests, that our marriages should be open to outside ideas and influences. It also advised husbands not to shout at wives about spending too much money on clothes. (Open Marriage was published in the same year that Last Tango in Paris was...