50 Shades Of Grey (A Review)

The Classics


I borrowed and read the hit book 50 Shades Of Grey (actually a trilogy). 50 Shades is the fastest selling paperback of all time, beating Harry Potter. Somewhat literally. It a romance novel, but lightly about BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism). You know. whips and chains, na na na come on. I honestly don’t think the book is that bad.

50 Shades was originally a bit of fan fiction based on the Twilight series, but it’s been adapted into something unique. Critical reviews of it are generally bad, but I can’t deny that it’s an interesting read. That said, Mills & Boone romance novels are page turners whereas Joyce’s Ulysses is not. Something can be bad and interesting.

50 Shades, the first novel at least, leaves a lot of room for characters to develop or change so perhaps it gets more sophisticated across the trilogy. As it is, the book is basically the classic girl meets guy, guy wants to tie girl and beat her up story. While the book is supposedly about BDSM, it actually describes very vanilla sex. The only thing that seems completely off is that Christian Grey seems to have no male refraction period. He can orgasm and have an erection again almost immediately. Which is weird.

Besides that the strangest it gets is some spanking and blindfolding, nothing too severe. It’s a bit of a fantasy work in that Christian’s unexplained wealth and virility enable huge leaps by the author. She (the author) can switch locations or situations rapidly simply because that character is so wealthy, and yet he also seems to have no shortage of time.

There is honestly more detail about food in the novel about BDSM. Most of the latter is just hinted at. Perhaps it gets darker in the later tomes, but I doubt it.

50 Shades is truly a fantasy novel. It’s an unqualified woman who feels unbeautiful being wooed expensively (gifts, cars, computers, travel, food) by a man who is perfect in all ways but one, giving her something to fix. There’s not much more to it, but it’s not that there needs to be. It’s really entertaining enough.

It’s not a great novel by any stroke but it’s not, as many critics have said, completely unreadable. It’s completely readably and kind of OK. It’s a romance novel with a twist. Why not.

RSS feed | Trackback URI

2 Comments »

sack
2012-10-25 09:24:37

Oh i don’t know. I got bored after a while. Then i started skipping parts. same happened with twilight saga. But i didn’t went through the 2nd and 3 rd novel much (even with skipping).

I don’t know whether you can call it a romance novel (erotic romance perhaps?) . What ever it is, you get bored because there is little excitement (yeah, in this case exciting things are the sex) in the book and those exciting things happen repeatedly with little change.

 
Patrick
2012-10-29 06:25:39

Although I’ve avoided the temptation of the piles of 50 Shades in my local Aussie Woolies, I have found my male fantasies subtly tickled by the alternate 50 Sheds of Grey. Quite blokey!

http://fiftyshedsofgrey.tumblr.com/

 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.

email indi AT indi.ca.


Recent Comments


Monolithic Islam (5)

tastyjujubes: The Religion of Peace at work again: http://www.guar dian.co.uk/uk/2 013/may/22/wool wich-two-shot-i n-police-incide nt-live-coverag e

sharanga: Racial profiling is not racist if it works. Similarly, identifying groups among people is not wrong if it allows you to predict reality with reasonable accuracy. When you don’t know everything, you play the odds. For example, if I...

Dark Lord: Why is it so hard to buy pork anywhere in Sri Lanka? Most sellers don’t sell pork at all, or sell it only to known customers from a hidden storage at the back of the store, which goes like “don̵ 7;t tell anyone, we are...

40 Under 40 (6)

sharanga: Congratulations !

Malik: Looks like Mara and Co has blocked GossipLanka.com ????? What’s going on here??????????

Diyath: Congratulations Indi!.. All the best for your future tech endeavors!

Anti-Social Marketing (Nibras Bawa) (19)

David Blacker: Who cares, man? you’re still moaning on about a fight you lost months ago. It’s like the kid who gets his ass kicked then talk big later. You lost, you ran away like a whiney ponneya, and now you’re actually...

sharanga: A more accurate description would be I had my penis up your because you were refusing to answer a simple question. Now the fact that you thought I was not just Heshan, but also meechum just shows that you are stupid, and therefore your...

Chi Chi Hits The Scene, And A Referee (5)

sack: Indiz post about Gotabhaya had much more comments. http://indi.ca/ 2012/07/gotas-p uppy-hate/

Liberal One: He he, the article with the least number of comments out of Indi’s recent ones. Looks like no body wants to put their lives at risk by commenting on the wrong article. I’m off as well.

Monolithic Islam

Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice op-ed in the Guardian. Money quote for me was ‘Individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion’. If you go buy news reports Muslims or Jews or Sri Lankans or any number of groups can appear monolithic and uniform. When you meet people, however, you find that they’re not. If you meet enough people you hopefully become aware of that tendency and judge people less by group identity in advance. Muslims, however, are quite publicly tarred with the same brush these days, and it really isn’t fair. Or accurate.

40 Under 40

I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and Kottu but also YAMU) but also in that the magazine takes a bit of a critical stance. It’s worth reading the editorial (which I can only find in print) where they describe that only a few women are included and that all of the 40 are from middle to upper middle class backgrounds.

Chi Chi Hits The Scene, And A Referee

I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the Daily Mirror Life section, which is well worth a read. In other news, he also recently slapped a referee around in full public view at a rugby match. At least it seems that his elder brother restrained him.

Anti-Social Marketing (Nibras Bawa)

In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from Kottu. He also published some plagiarized stuff on Groundviews. He flamed out a bit more then disappeared. Until now. Now he’s back hosting a rather expensive social media event in Colombo, which is a bit ironic, seeing as he was known for being the most anti-social person the blogosphere had seen at the time.