weekend read: Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy

I read them.  All of them. 

Normally I do one book review per post, but don’t feel like I can drag the series out for three individual posts since my thoughts are the same on all of them.  Spoiler alert: if you plan on reading the book/s, you should skip this review.

I have so many random observations and thoughts bouncing around in my head about these books that I’m just going to bullet this post since I’m not sure I can segway from one topic to the next fluidly. 

-I decided to jump on the Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James bandwagon because I felt left out when people were discussing them.  I needed to have an opinion and didn’t want to take other people’s love or hatred for them as my own.  I really wanted to know about it first hand.

-Wow.  There’s some really kinky stuff in there.  Sometimes it was fun to read it and other times, I just skimmed if briefly before getting back to the rest of the story.  I was intrigued by Christian and Ana, their relationship, Christian’s past and present, and all their drama that sometimes I felt the sex was getting in the way.  But in the same breath, I understand that so much of Christian’s story revolved around the sex that you couldn’t really take it out.  It was very cliched and predictable, but I was still drawn in and couldn’t stop reading.

-Um, no one has sex that many times a day.  Christian’s penis and Ana’s vagina should have fallen off.  For real, my mom told me that could happen if you have sex too much.

-What scares me about Fifty Shades of Grey is that some women will read this book and compare their relationship to it (something completely made up and unattainable).  Or someone younger who has never been in a relationship or done the sex before will think this is real life.  And it’s not.  AT ALL.  Those can be dangerous thoughts and goals when someone reads this book and feels her life doesn’t measure up to that story.  And a skewed reality/unrealistic goals can set you (and me) up for all kinds of relationship failure. 

-Chris made fun of me while I read these books.  But he also reaped some benefits, if you catch my drift.  Then he stopped making fun of me.

-I know it’s been discussed multiple times that the writing is pretty bad.  I agree completely.  At times, I felt James was best friends with her thesaurus while writing and used obscure words that didn’t really fit.  And there were types or punctuation errors in each of the three books.  Normally, it was during a sex scene.  Like all the copy editors were too caught up in the moment to realize there were two periods or an extra word thrown in the sentence.  It was distracting and it made me laugh.

-I have never read a book with so much murmuring.  EVERYONE MURMURS.  “blah blah blah,” Christian murmured.  “Blah blah blah,” Ana murmured.  The murmuring was out.of.control.

-This genre (“mature adult”/”erotica”) is not something I had ever read before or wish to read again.  Unless James writes more Christian and Ana stuff because I will line up to get that next book.  Like a drug, I need more Mr. and Mrs. Grey. (Although I’m pretty sure when/if the movie comes out, I will be avoiding that because it will be straight up porn.)

What do you think?  Have you read any of them?  Are you avoiding them?  Sometimes I read the books at the gym and while I didn’t hide the cover, I was hyper-aware of it being in my hands and who might see me.  I did feel kind of dirty then.  ha.

P.S. I was doing a search for the book covers and came across this article about who should play Christian Grey in the movie.  I don’t know who this man is, but this is Christian in my head.  Holy hell.  Hottt.