Fifty Shades of Grey - E. L. James

I've never liked giving out bad reviews. I hope one day to become a writer and I think I know how much work and discipline it takes to sit down and write something. It's a full time job. That's why I do admire people who are published and successful. But, E. L. James, come on? This is one of the times I really will write a bad review.

There are so many things that are wrong with this book that I seriously don't know where to start. Brace yourselves, this might be a rant...

So, E. L. James started writing Fifty Shades of Grey as a Twilight fan fiction. Obviously. If you were a pre-teen when Twilight came out, this is the book for you. If not, chances are that you will laugh your ass of. One of the reasons I like to read is because I enjoy beautiful language and most of the time, it's the language, not the plot that will make it or brake it for the book. I can't imagine anyone over he age of twelve that has opened a book once in a while to have such a bad writing style. I know kids who go to elementary school that write better than she does. An even bigger problem considering style is that she's tried writing erotic fiction. You need to write even better in order to write good erotic fiction. This way, most of her book was funny, rather than provocative, and sometimes, it just made me want to tap her on the head and say: Oh, honey...

I'm not a prude, honestly. The guideline I use to judge books is: There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all. (Originally written by Oscar Wilde.) I will read a book that deals with any topic, everyone has the right to write about anything they want. Not every heroine has to be a strong female character. We have the right to read about those who aren't and we don't have the right to attack an author whose female character decides to drop out of school and become a housewife. But we have right to attack badly written books.


Have you ever read Joyce's Letters to Nora? Now, that's how a master does erotic writing. Seriously, check it out and you'll see what I mean. He's provocative, romantic and has made me blush from time to time. Fifty Shades of Grey have also made me blush, but only because I was ashamed instead of E. L. James. I don't want to believe that the only reason that this book got so much publicity is because it's explicit. Anastasia refers to her genital area as down there. Let us applaud to the explicitness! It seems to me that the  the author never goes over the line of acceptable to a conservative housewife. It pains me that we live in the twenty first century and libraries are banning Fifty Shades of Grey because it's too graphic and yet Marquis de Sade published porn novels some three hundred years ago and they often (actually, always) involve things that would be illegal today and were illegal then. How shocking would he be today?

Are Ana and Christian supposed to have a personality? She likes reading English classics,enjoys cuddling next to a fire with a book, doesn't drink coffee, but rather drinks tea. He is a tortured soul and likes obscure music. And yet, you don't have a personality. I can't get over the impression that our hero, Christian Grey, was named after a true hero, Dorian Gray.

One of the most annoying things in this book is the phrase inner goddess. Are you kidding me?! I'm raging as I write this. An inner goddess?! What is that? Some sort of cliched expression taken form a self help book? Every woman is a goddess, circles of wheat, voodoo chanting, etc... I'm sorry, Ana, but you're no goddess. Your a whiny cunt. 

Too bad, because it really had potential. A good writer would have provoked the insides of human psychology. It always makes me mad when an incompetent writer writes about a great idea. The potential to write about human psychology and also explore it was immense. Are BDSM relationships abusive? Why do people enjoy BDSM? What are we prepared to do for a partner? How much a re we willing to change? Should we change at all? Can we really have a long lasting relationship with someone who is so much different from us? Instead, all we got was some five hundred pages of: Christian is beautiful, I want to bite my lip, Christian is a stalker, my inner goddess is talking crap.

One more thing that confuses me about Fifty Shades of Grey is the plagiarism issue. How did this thing get published? I'm no legal expert, but people have gone to court over less. This story is basically the same as Twilight, minus the vampires who sparkle plus the sex. There's the frend José/Jacob, the rich famifly, adoptive children, a klutzy girl that prefers to be called by her nickname, an incompetent mother... At least the Cullens had an excuse for being so beautiful, seeing as they were vampires and all, but what's the Gray's excuse?

The only good thing about Fifty shades of Grey is the beautiful cover art. Why do the worst books always have the best covers? is it intentional, to get us interested in a book we would never consider buying, or is it a personal thing of mine that I just tend to focus more on the covers of bad books? I guess we'll never know. Because these books aren't going up my shelf any time soon. I hope my compulsive personality will give me a brake this time and won't make me read the rest of the trilogy.