Book review! Almost.
I've been meaning to post this for a few days and a conversation in CAGS has reminded me about it...
I've recently read the first of the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't criticise something unless you've tried it - especially when it comes to art and entertainment.
You shouldn't say a movie is bad unless you've watched it.
You can’t say an artist is talentless unless you've heard them.
You can’t say that an author is a talentless hack unless you've read them.
You can say that it doesn’t interest you and isn’t to your tastes, but actual criticism should come from experience.
So, with that in mind and the constant explosions on my Facebook from female friends back home, I decided to read Fifty Shades of Grey to see if it’s as bad as I was expecting it to be.
Oh boy...
Firstly I can actually understand why it has become as popular as it is. Erotic fiction written in first person (a woman’s first person, at that), neatly targeted to appeal to women and accepted in the mainstream doesn’t happen very often. Especially the mainstream part. The audience for the book is people who probably don’t read that much and have no experience of these kind of stories so to them it’s new, exciting and very, very naughty.
They won’t realise how horribly written it is or how generic the characters and settings are - they just see something they haven’t read before that’s a little taboo and to them, scandalous.
It’s like selling cheap and out of date chocolate to somebody that has never tried it before. Of course they’re going to love it! They don’t know how good chocolate could be!
The female character, Anastasia Steele, is a complete Mary Sue and hits every trope there is. She’s clumsy, she’s naïve, she doesn’t realise how attractive she is but has every man in the book falling over her, she’s intelligent, smart mouthed and stumbles from one situation to another with all the grace and knowledge of a stuffed elephant. She’s what the reader wants to be, but with enough vagueness for everyone to relate to her.
But that doesn’t annoy me. The book is in first person and it’s describing a relationship - the reader needs to put themselves in her shoes and be able to relate to her. The fact that it’s being done in such a lazy way is frustrating but understandable.
Christian Grey, however… jeez. Gorgeous, rich, strong, smooth and well dressed, the perfect rouge with a hidden good heart to make the ladies swoon. He has all of the trappings of wealth and privilege but the tragic back story that he tries to hide but Anastasia manages to draw out of him slowly. She wants to save him! And rescue him! He’s just a poor, tortured little sadist! It’s that really lazy convention of a woman finding a man that’s bad for her, making him fall in love and then redeeming him.
The biggest selling point of the book is the sex, of course. I didn’t know it was possible for sex to be so… unsexy. It’s impossibly perfect from the start despite the fact that Anastasia is a virgin (of course!) and she’s able to orgasm from pretty much everything he does to her (I’m expecting her first orgasm from him saying “hello” to occur somewhere in book 2). It’s just sex scene after sex scene and they get progressively more boring. The more tricks the author puts in there, the more yawn inducing they become. It becomes an anthology of badly written fanfics and uses as many tired clichés, dialogues and patterns as fanfiction does too. The actual BDSM is minimal, so all you get is a string of loosely connected sex scenes that aren’t naughty, aren’t unusual, aren’t realistic and aren’t hot in the slightest.
Actually, most fanfiction generally is written better. This may have been better if it had stayed as Twilight fiction because at least then there might be sparkling lulz to break the monotony.
Erotic books are supposed to turn you on and make you want sex. I came away from reading this wanting nothing to do with it ever again.
By the end of the first book I found that I couldn’t care less why Christian has burns on his chest. I don’t care about his initiation into BDSM. I don’t care that Anastasia walked away from him. I don’t care about any outstanding mystery of the book other than what the publishing company was smoking when they agreed to publish it.
So, if I were to sum up Fifty Shades of Grey in one sentence it would be worse than Twilight and half as sexy.
And yes, I’ve read the Twilight books too. They were awful and just as cliché, but at least they were also funny (albeit unintentionally).
I've recently read the first of the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't criticise something unless you've tried it - especially when it comes to art and entertainment.
You shouldn't say a movie is bad unless you've watched it.
You can’t say an artist is talentless unless you've heard them.
You can’t say that an author is a talentless hack unless you've read them.
You can say that it doesn’t interest you and isn’t to your tastes, but actual criticism should come from experience.
So, with that in mind and the constant explosions on my Facebook from female friends back home, I decided to read Fifty Shades of Grey to see if it’s as bad as I was expecting it to be.
Oh boy...
Firstly I can actually understand why it has become as popular as it is. Erotic fiction written in first person (a woman’s first person, at that), neatly targeted to appeal to women and accepted in the mainstream doesn’t happen very often. Especially the mainstream part. The audience for the book is people who probably don’t read that much and have no experience of these kind of stories so to them it’s new, exciting and very, very naughty.
They won’t realise how horribly written it is or how generic the characters and settings are - they just see something they haven’t read before that’s a little taboo and to them, scandalous.
It’s like selling cheap and out of date chocolate to somebody that has never tried it before. Of course they’re going to love it! They don’t know how good chocolate could be!
The female character, Anastasia Steele, is a complete Mary Sue and hits every trope there is. She’s clumsy, she’s naïve, she doesn’t realise how attractive she is but has every man in the book falling over her, she’s intelligent, smart mouthed and stumbles from one situation to another with all the grace and knowledge of a stuffed elephant. She’s what the reader wants to be, but with enough vagueness for everyone to relate to her.
But that doesn’t annoy me. The book is in first person and it’s describing a relationship - the reader needs to put themselves in her shoes and be able to relate to her. The fact that it’s being done in such a lazy way is frustrating but understandable.
Christian Grey, however… jeez. Gorgeous, rich, strong, smooth and well dressed, the perfect rouge with a hidden good heart to make the ladies swoon. He has all of the trappings of wealth and privilege but the tragic back story that he tries to hide but Anastasia manages to draw out of him slowly. She wants to save him! And rescue him! He’s just a poor, tortured little sadist! It’s that really lazy convention of a woman finding a man that’s bad for her, making him fall in love and then redeeming him.
The biggest selling point of the book is the sex, of course. I didn’t know it was possible for sex to be so… unsexy. It’s impossibly perfect from the start despite the fact that Anastasia is a virgin (of course!) and she’s able to orgasm from pretty much everything he does to her (I’m expecting her first orgasm from him saying “hello” to occur somewhere in book 2). It’s just sex scene after sex scene and they get progressively more boring. The more tricks the author puts in there, the more yawn inducing they become. It becomes an anthology of badly written fanfics and uses as many tired clichés, dialogues and patterns as fanfiction does too. The actual BDSM is minimal, so all you get is a string of loosely connected sex scenes that aren’t naughty, aren’t unusual, aren’t realistic and aren’t hot in the slightest.
Actually, most fanfiction generally is written better. This may have been better if it had stayed as Twilight fiction because at least then there might be sparkling lulz to break the monotony.
Erotic books are supposed to turn you on and make you want sex. I came away from reading this wanting nothing to do with it ever again.
By the end of the first book I found that I couldn’t care less why Christian has burns on his chest. I don’t care about his initiation into BDSM. I don’t care that Anastasia walked away from him. I don’t care about any outstanding mystery of the book other than what the publishing company was smoking when they agreed to publish it.
So, if I were to sum up Fifty Shades of Grey in one sentence it would be worse than Twilight and half as sexy.
And yes, I’ve read the Twilight books too. They were awful and just as cliché, but at least they were also funny (albeit unintentionally).