I told you guys in my last post that I was reviewing 50 Shames of Earl Grey for Insane Hussein Reviews, since I needed something to restore my faith in literature after I reviewed 50 Shades of Grey.
I wasn’t lying. Here’s the 50 Shames review. GO FORTH!
A love hate summary of my most recent (and shaming) Goodreads shelf addition, 50 Shades of Grey, presented in bites of 140 characters or less.
Warning: Content may be borderline spoiler-y. I will put the review behind a read more link below the image SOLELY because I’m trying to be considerate of those among us who want to read this dribble.
So I’m writing a romance novel. Sort of. But before you write for a genre, you have to at least read it. And additionally, why write something within a genre you hate, right? (It does make sense. I mean, if you want to write something good, you should actually like what you’re doing.) I want to write good romance, because I like good romance, but romantic fiction is an expansive field, so sometimes you have to dig through a lot of shit before you hit gold. You start at the popular stuff and burrow, hoping to find an entire t-rex carcass packed beneath the dirt.
I started digging and I hit petrified shit.
50 Shades of Grey became this INCREDIBLE phenomenon around April, and is a published work that originated as Twilight fanfiction. For my first fifty pages or so, I didn’t quite realize until some things (“Damn it, I was biting my lip AGAIN. For the BILLIONTH TIME BECAUSE LIP-BITING IS THE ONLY PHYSICAL ACTION I CAN PERFORM WITHOUT STUMBLING… most of the time.”) started popping up. And then the internet research said, “Oh yeah, by the way…”
Still, the publisher said the book “bore very little resemblance to Twilight!” Given that, I –tried- to put the story’s origins out of my mind, so as not to be biased in my reading.
I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this if I had failed. I am definitely biased… because one of the most singular things E.L. James did well was encapsulate Stephanie Meyer’s loathsome, insipid characters within Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. (And let me just say: from the beginning, I did think the name “Anastasia Rose Steele” sounded stupid.)
I’m not going to give you my standard mile-long review where I pick over every point. Instead, I’m going to give you the niblet version: my tweets while I read the book. So just in case you missed all of them, you can now read the entirety of Sugarcunt’s #50ShadesOfBullshit tweets from start to finish. For the sake of brevity, I’ll remove my hash tag from these quotations.