a rare and pointed book review, for those who have indulged:

i’d been hearing of this book series for a while, and the notion of a dirty sex-fiction piqued my interest. during my travels i found a used bookshop, and there it sat on the top shelf: the first book. after performing a brief victory dance and reaching up, i held it. hmm…

thick, erect, and glaring back at me, i turned the pages and felt each one brush against the pad of my middle finger, and desire coursed through my veins like a fiery parasite on crack cocaine.

JUST KIDDING. but really, that pretty much sums up the tripartite story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.

the first thing that struck me was the simple language. i am no author, and not one to judge. but i will. because in my lessened linguistic vantage point, i can still say that E L James has written a deliciously erotic story with the diction of The Little Engine that Could.

i decided to ignore the language. if anything, i thought, it’ll serve shortcut to the juicy parts. yet the incredibly irritating protagonist soon interrupted my reverie (kidding again, James uses this phrase maybe three times per chapter.) if i ever meet Anastasia Steele, or anyone to her image, i will deal her a swift kick to the vagina. you are 21, in the united states, not Amish, and you’ve never had sex or gotten drunk or smoked a joint. you say jeez. you have the self esteem of a hermit crab, and you’ve only kissed, like, two whole boys. and everything scares you. i’d like to place Ana Steele in the Middle East for a few months and see how she deals. all of this, and the reader is trapped inside her immature and overly chatty stream of consciousness for the entire ordeal.

the character of Christian Grey is a lot more agreeable, but then, i am a red blooded female with an affinity for troubled dominating men. the problem is, i’ve seen this character, so, many, times, from Fitzwilliam Darcy to Chuck Bass. obscenely rich, obscenely good looking, obscenely arrogant, and obscenely fucked up. fifty shades of fucked up, as James repeats excessively. yet another issue with the books! most phrases that actually catch the eye and tickle the palette are soon destroyed by the author’s over-employment of them. predictably, he falls for ingenue Steele and reforms, and once he does the book spirals rapidly from racy to nauseating. we get it, you love each other.

alongside the love story is a series of secondary plots which are grossly underdeveloped. i do not care enough about roommate Katherine Kavanaugh or Grey’s family members to really take in their stories. they are completely marginalized by the full, pulsing headiness and tortuously slow buildup of Grey and Steele’s romance. (tee hee.) i do wish they had been given more importance; it would have afforded the story a more even composition.

this has been a largely negative reaction. i must amend it. i thoroughly enjoyed the first two books, in spite of my above-mentioned grievances. i could not put them down. unfortunately, not enough happens. the threat on Grey’s life and the return of his nasty exes are negligible complications that seem like they’ve been thrown in to jazz things up. also, i never thought i’d ever object to this, but there’s just too much sex. i’m not reading Maxim’s “50 ways to fuck someone in handcuffs,” here, and it’s gotten tiresome reading about Steele’s 17 orgasms per minute. the first book was by far the most exciting, when Grey was still an asshole and a mystery. now, halfway through the third book and reviewing the series prematurely, i’m sincerely hoping something goes terribly wrong for excitement’s sake.

that said; ladies, READ THE BOOKS! while certainly no literary revolution, the 50 shades saga is an undeniably entertaining guilty-pleasure read. it’s a Danielle Steel romance (ironic, no?) tied up in leather cuffs, strained with a ball gag. it’s porn you can carry around to enjoy in public, and gritty inspiration for those in a sexual rut.

just make sure your little sisters don’t get curious and start reading them behind your back.