• FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
• by E L James
• [rated by PBS readers as #86]
• 514 pages

120 pages into Fifty Shades of Grey and I am shaking my head once again. Honestly, will this project ever cease to be surprising?

I have to start with this point. I was ABSOLUTELY SURE that this book was the one title that didn’t belong on this esteemed list. I saw it on the list and shrugged, certain that the voting happened close enough to this book’s big reception that it just got fad points. That had to be it.

I had never been drawn to it. My sister had loaned it to me, so I knew that, looking at the list, I had one less book to buy. But I also knew I’d had it for almost a decade without even considering opening it.

To be honest, I still don’t have a definitive answer to the question of its inclusion. I mean, does Fifty Shades of Grey really have anything in common, quality level wise, with Another Country by James Baldwin? Of course not.

But then. It was a quiet night. I picked it up and read 120 pages of it without looking up! I almost felt guilty about how fast and easy a read this was after Book Thief.

But I’m not and don’t want to be a book snob. This story reads well because it is paced really well. My hat is ALWAYS off to pacing. I don’t care how pulpy some might think an author is – if they can keep my interest and keep me turning pages, I feel I am in their debt.

And then it is an entire book about sex! I am simply amazed by this. Why? Because sex is really hard to write! It is even harder to write well!

As an author myself, I’ve been told several times that I write sex well and I appreciate that. But I insert three minute sex scenes into a larger plot; this is a whole book centering around sex. One would think that sooner or later, the descriptions and/or verbiage would lapse into the same stupid words that every one uses. But this author never does that. That alone deserves a high five.

James’ greatest trick is that she really has fashioned a plucky and interesting protagonist. She is experienced and falls hard for this guy, but you go with her on her ride, listening to all the directions her mind goes in.

I mean, think about it. A full length story about S&M with the girl being the submissive and yet she is never passive. At least so far. Think of that! It seems like an almost impossible hat trick to pull off. But James has fashioned a women who you want to follow as much as the sex. In fact more, but it’s a fairly delicious package so far.

So what am I, a quarter into it? Who knows where I’ll end up? Maybe it will start being more stock sex scenes. Maybe it won’t hold up. But so far?

I am, once again, very pleasantly surprised.

2/22/21 – DONE

I wonder if any of you remember a book called The Celestine Prophecy? It came out shortly after I got out of college. It was a story about something spiritual that seemed very on point and fascinating to all of us then. It was a guy on some sort of spiritual quest.

Anyway, everyone was buying and reading it and when they spoke about it, the most common complaint was that it wasn’t written very well.

I bought it. Not written very well was the world’s biggest understatement. It read like a high school paper written by the smelly guy in the back of the class whose emotional range fell between angry and dumb.

Unlike others, I couldn’t even grasp what they were grasping from the book. The terrible writing was way too off-putting for any deeper points to be made.

Somehow, I had it in my mind that 50 Shades of Grey was going to prove to be the Celestine Prophecy of S&M. People said it was badly written and I went there. So much so that, like I mentioned earlier, this was the one book on this list that I was absolutely sure didn’t belong. I immediately decided that, if the list were made in ten years, this was a title that would have fallen by the wayside.

As has happened a bunch with this project, I was wrong. I was happily wrong! I couldn’t imagine that a book about bondage could be written well. EL James proved me out of my depth. Sigh. This is getting annoying!

Here’s what is so right about this book:

1) There isn’t a moment when the writing about sex slips into stupid verbiage. Even writers that I like a lot can slip into that, saying “he thrust his hot throbbing member…” or “he explored the depths of her…” Many times, I have been reading an otherwise good novel and the sex shows up and those phrases come in and it is tough to take. You think to yourself, well he writes well but not about sex.

It really only takes a millisecond and a couple of cliche terms to take you right out of sex scenes and feel stupid for having started to read them in the first place. Yet, here is a book that is over 500 pages long and I never once felt in judgment of these two people or the author or asked myself why I was reading this.

2) Sex heavy stories descend into archetypes mostly. Neither of these two characters is anywhere near stereotypical. In fact, I felt that both of them were characters I had never read before.

3) The sex was small compared to the feelings within. The psychology and the feelings were the through line. The sex was the punctuation. If you can get that balance right, you’ve got something.

I don’t know how many books I’ve read that were mostly centered around sex. Maybe read a handful. But as I read Fifty Shades, I was aware that, on every page, I’d never read anything that got the balance as right as this. This is solid book writing in my view.

4) Most important saved for last. The book centers around these two characters and I truly liked them. I liked them very much. I haven’t seen the movies, of course (I told you – I had the book that my sister loaned me for almost a decade and I always read the book first. If I didn’t read it, I wasn’t going to see the movie.).

But though Dakota Johnson looks like she might have been a good choice for it, there would be no way in a film that you could get the best part of this opus, which is her charater’s running mental commentary.

There is never a moment where you aren’t involved with her dilemma. You feel her indecision and you feel her love for him. As I mentioned earlier, she is utterly not passive and that is what felt fresh and new to me.

Since I am currently in a phase of reading about five books at the same time, one or two others that I’ve been reading had some sex scenes in them briefly and I was completely aware that they didn’t hold a candle to this one. And NOT because this book had more sex. It was because we were given sex by a writer who knew how to tell it right.

Grey, the leading man, is no brooding Heathcliff. He is an amazing and complex character. On the surface fairly cliche, but as time goes on, you the reader want to know as badly about the layers within him as Ana does. The author has not crafted a great woman and a placeholder for the man. Both are growing and changing throughout. How nice for us that the work was done to make that happen.

I will doubtless think of many more things to say about this book, but it was a happy surprise to me. In fact, I didn’t finish it for a while, leaving it unread for a week here and a week there. In all fairness, that particular reticence was more about the fact that I liked this book and these characters and that felt nice. Never know when, at any moment, I’d be in a new book , slogging through a plot with some weird Russian officers with names I can’t pronounce.

So there you go! That’s just me. You might hate it, but Fifty Shades of Grey was pure fun, while War & Peace haunts me…

At any rate, would I recommend this? That’s a funny one. I don’t know the reader’s relation to sex or books about it. If that doesn’t float your boat, this won’t get you to shore. But it ranks as a huge, fun surprise to me.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if, after I read the whole list, I still feel as I do today – that Fifty Shades of Grey belongs on there. One involving, surprising, fun read.

Send those letters disagreeing with me! I’m ready.