I don’t know about you, but my reading tastes lie at the intersection of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Lolita. So, when on the second-to-last day of my Spring Break, I opened up my Kindle’s New York Times app to read an article that described a book as both the “adult Twilight” and “Mommy porn,” I was obviously intrigued. With a description like that, it was clear that this book, Fifty Shades of Grey, was going to be a massive trainwreck, and I was probably going to enjoy it.
To my utter surprise, forking over $9.99 to purchase a copy of this book was quite possibly the worst decision I’ve made in 2012.
In case you haven’t had the misfortune of stumbling upon this sorry excuse for a book, the plot involves Christian Grey, a hyper-controlling yet beautiful CEO, eager to start a BDSM relationship with Anastasia Steele, a sickeningly innocent recent college grad. Steele and Grey become Steele Grey more than a dozen times, but it’s done with riding crops and a whole lot of spanking. Throw in some dialogue from the 19th century (“You beguile me”?) and a handful of distracting typos, and you’ve got Fifty Shades of Grey.
Some other things about this book—Anastasia frequently bites her lower lip, and that apparently turns Christian on to the point where he has to force her to stop. Let that simmer for a while. I just…can’t. Anastasia also has an “inner goddess” that suddenly pops up in the middle of the book.
Before I go any further, the average review on Amazon for this book is four out of five stars. This is really terrifying to me. If a large proportion of the readers of Fifty Shades give this book a highly favorable review, it means there is a significant amount of people in this county who don’t value logic or grammar. Given that Rick Santorum is still a contender for the Republican nomination, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me too much…but still.
Perusing some of the other one-star reviews, I found that I agreed with the majority of the review titles: “Absolutely the worst book I’ve read in years,” “Could not finish” and “Fifty ways to yawn.”
Also, The New York Times’ story on Fifty Shades seemed to hint that this book is responsible for waking up the sex lives of America. If this is true, it would seem that we as a country must be sexually starved in a desert of abstinence, and this book is a drop of poison masquerading as water. This sentence probably didn’t make sense, but this is the kind of sentence that would appear in Fifty Shades of Grey, and that’s the number one bestseller in the country right now.
Something I learned about this book after reading it: E.L. James originally wrote Fifty Shades of Grey as a Twilight fan fiction. For those of you who don’t know, fan fiction refers to fan-written stories that use characters and situations that were created by a different author.
She wrote a wildly popular fan fiction that readers could access for free on the web, but decided she would try to capitalize off of her success. After changing character names, she has now sold more than 250,000 units of a book being hyped everywhere from the New York Times to Good Morning America.
There’s a major ethical issue with James making money off Fifty Shades, beyond that it’s a terrible book (though it is). Many authors are concerned that James took a derivative work, made some miniscule changes, and is now making a profit. Put another way, James essentially copied the characters that Stephanie Meyers created for Twilight, and pasted them into her sloppily written erotica. This raises a few important questions, such as: Does E.L. James owe Meyers anything for profiting off of the product of her imagination? Do authors even own the characters that they create?
What does it mean that the book that currently tops the New York Times’ Bestseller list is both utter trash and not an original work? I don’t really know how to answer that, but I will say that this reflects very poorly on our country.
First, instead of reading books of literary merit, we choose to entertain ourselves with frothy reads full of violent sex and little to no character growth. Second, a large amount of people don’t even recognize that this book is terrible. In fact, a significant amount of people actually think it’s high quality. For example, this excerpt from an Amazon review by “An older man” says, “James is a polished novelist. Her dialogue is crisp, her prose poised, and her paragraphs well-parsed.” This entire statement is objectively not true.
I feel like this book represents everything that’s wrong with our country right now. We want quick entertainment, but we don’t necessarily care about quality. This is the first time I’ve ever regretted reading a book. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like a lot of people would agree with that sentiment.
—Anna Koelsch
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