Personally, I quite like the Fifty Shades trilogy. I’m currently reading the third (and final) book, and honestly, it hasn’t bothered me quite like I thought it would. Admittedly, when I first started reading it, I found it hilarious. It was so typical, so predictable, and I could literally pick bits of Twilight out of it as I went along. I would read bits out and just laugh at the insanity of the situation. But it did get me thinking quite a bit, and here is where my acceptance of the novel lies.

Who cares?

Honestly, it’s not at all hard to see that this novel came from a Twilight based fan-fiction. I didn’t know before, and even I managed to go “oh would you look at that!”. But did I stop reading? Correction, could I stop reading? Nope. I could not. It was addictive and that’s just it. It’s what Twilight had. Twilight is so poorly written that I could probably shit something out that stands a better chance at handling the English language. That never stopped me from reading it though, because it was so damn addictive! It’s the same here. In my opinion, these novels are handled slightly better, but they’re definitely not works of literary genius. But that got me thinking again. Surely that’s something else we should praise about these books. I’ve read a lot of classic novels: Austen, Dickens, Bronte, Shakespearean plays, Hardy, etc. But dear God, it took me a while. Such complex sentence structures and word flourishes (as much as I enjoyed the stories) where not easy reading at times. It was so refreshing to sit down with a book and actually finish it within a few hours: BECAUSE I CAN. Re-fresh-ing.

In fairness, I understand the critiques. I really do. As soon as I’d read the Twilight books and got to the end of an extremely far-fetched plot, I did feel relieved it was all over. I admit that some of the themes in this trilogy are a tad hyperbolic and would definitely never, ever happen in reality. But I really like that, and I think that’s what makes this story so successful. As someone who wants to study English literature at university, I would never treat poorly written books with such a dismissive attitude, but I don’t think it’s right to take every single novel handed to us so seriously. To me, it’s easy to read, it’s interesting, it’s addictive and I couldn’t care less how far-fetched or badly written it is. It’s a novel I’m reading for fun, and it’s what I’m looking for. At the end of the day, the Harry Potter series isn’t written particularly well, and look how loved it is. Of course, there’s no scenes of Ron tying Hermione up and whomping her willow, but there’s definitely websites for that.

I’m not looking for debates or to start turf-wars, but I am interested on other people’s thoughts. Obviously, these are mine and mine alone. Just though I’d share… And I really wanted to type fast and pretend I was typing up very important business…
Anyway, thoughts?

1. danigreenhouse answered: I love you Churm
2. hellorandomstranger posted this