I was just 17, you know what I mean, when I first read Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure.”

I’d already been hooked by his “Return of the Native,” a novel with bizarre farming customs and weird character names: Eustacia, Clym, Diggory.

(I wasn’t alone. Horny Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye”wishes he could call up Thomas Hardy and kinda talk dirty about Eustacia Vye.)

But I chose Hardy’s novels for my senior thesis.

“Jude the Obscure”is about a working-class lad with university ambitions who’s waylaid by lust. But Hardy was writing in the 1890s, when the wording had to be genteel – even in the wrestling-with-hog-parts scene.

I didn’t know to snicker when the lusty barmaid Arabella invites Jude to find the egg she’s warming – between her breasts.

Last week, I laughed my head off when I reread that. Decades later, I do know a come-on.

But most of “Jude”is still sad. Everybody loses; a lot them die.

Still, if you’ve never outgrown juvenile prurience . . . for a hot scene, turn to chapter 8.

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The obscure ‘Jude the Obscure’