Acerbic Views

50 Shades of how to be an inane woman who can’t be around a man she is attracted to without melting into a puddle.

I just started on 50 Shades of Grey this week. I am about eight chapters in and I feel absolutely compelled to blog about it. A few people have asked me to blog about it once I started reading it, so here it is.

The basic premise of the book is that a girl meets a super rich and mysterious CEO, they have insta-chemistry, they cannot stay away despite from each other despite themselves and then bam! He has a BDSM fetish. This is what I am gathering so far from the book.

How this book has sold 31 million copies before even being on shelves for a year and is already being developed into a movie is honestly beyond me, because well, so far the book is really mediocre.

It is totally readable, I give it that. I do honestly feel compelled to know what happens. I am sure I will even read this to the end, because once I start a book, I always finish it. Even the god-awful first Twilight book.

Which leads me into my next observation. 50 Shades started as a Twilight Fan-fiction, and after reading the first few chapters, it becomes really, really apparent. The book has that same juvenile airhead female lead character who meets a mysterious man who she is suddenly drawn to even though *gasp* he is bad for her. The parallels are obvious in the two. Even down to the constant and incessant inner monologue of the two main characters of each book.

My biggest qualm with the book is the constant babbling thought sharing that the author must do for the main character. Yes, Anastasia thinks Grey is hot. That is established by the embarrassing articulations of getting moist at him running his hand through a few strands of hair. We get it. The every page reminder of how much Anastasia is swooning over him just makes me feel like I am reading the inside of a teenage girls journal. I won’t be surprised if I turn one of the pages and a ticket stub of the first movie they went together is taped to it.

So far I haven’t really discoveredl anything about the main character aside from that she has never met a man who she has had a spark with. Until Grey. Then it is like her world is literally turned upside down. Now, I am not a woman, but all women that are of sound mind don’t literally turn to mush around the object of their affection like this girl does. The way this is written it is almost like this girl only exists simply to be in love with this Christian Grey.

The book was written by a middle aged woman with a family, and she described the book as ‘All her fantasies in there’. Really? Kudos to you because you have made enough money to live incredibly well for the rest of your life, but so far your book seems like the inside of a dimwitted teenage girls journal. I find it really off putting when in a book written for adults, characters are referred to as ‘pretty hot’. I have no idea why, but I find that as prose in a book, really cringe-worthy.

I have just reached the point in the book where Grey reveals to Anastasia that *gasp* he has a fetish for being dominant over a woman and leads her to a room full of bondage gear. This I guess will be the problem for Anastasia. How can she be a total puddle of a mess of a human to a man she has idolised for every second since meeting him less than a week ago, when the man wants to smack her around a little!?

So, to recap: the book is totally readable. In an escapist, dumb reality where girls are putty at the hands of a man with money, power and a bedroom full of whips and chains. That being said; I’ll still read all of it.