Simone and Her Books

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I’m not a big Valentine’s Day celebrator, but I know many of you love the day of Love, so I hope you have a wonderful one.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I wanted to write a little bit about a very famous book series that is finally playing its final film in theaters right now. I’m talking about 50 Shades of Grey.

I know the title of this post will give me away, but I have to be honest with you and tell you that I have read the entire 50 Shades of Grey series twice. Sigh. Please don’t hate me.

I first read the series a few years back as a treat for my birthday. I wanted to have a guilty pleasure read and I hadn’t read the series before, so I decided I would give it a go and see if it was as good (or as bad) as the hype was saying. Turns out, it was both.

I loved that it was terrible. I  honestly think that this is the reason why I continued to read it at first. I thought that it was crap and that the sex was not believable and the relationship between Ana and Christian was this super toxic one.

However, the biggest driver of my love of this series was the fact that I wanted to learn more about Christian Grey. If you weren’t aware, Christian Grey is a person who was abandoned by his mother at a very young age. He was abused by his mother’s pimp and his mother was also a drug addict. He lived in a crack house and after his mother died, the doctor treating his mother decided to take him in. He was extremely lucky as an abandoned child to meet his forever mother in a hospital waiting room.

When I read a story like that, I get curious. I want to know more about Christian and how he went from being a poor orphan to a super rich deviant (“I make $100,000 an hour,” is a line from the book on his salary). Why is he the way he is? Will they go more into this as the story unfolds? What kind of growth do I expect to see from someone as terrible as Christian Grey?

These were some questions floating around in my head after I finished the first one. Also, the first one leaves you on this massive cliffhanger and I needed to see what happened in the second one to ease my curious mind.

Sadly, you don’t really learn more about Christian Grey, but you do see him grow. From being the man who can barely stand a woman’s touch, he falls in love with Ana and ends up marrying her. It’s such a beautiful story, but when the writing and the writer aren’t the strongest, it becomes a story much more difficult to appreciate because of those glaring flaws.

However, that’s not the reason why I read it the second time. The second time I read it was when I went to go see the movies for the first time. I had seen both in the theaters and after watching both, I felt this compulsion to read the books again. I honestly don’t know really why I wanted to read it again other than the fact that it was such a guilty pleasure.

And I know that many of you will still be weirded out by the fact that I watched the movies more than once and read the books twice, but I really loved how brainless these books were. When you read a lot of serious novels about serious subjects, you want to escape that for a while. For me, I tend to read trashy romance novels with poorly depicted images of a very misunderstood subculture. Do I feel shame in this? Not really. Because I like what I like and it made me happy to read about Christian and Ana and eventually what happens to them.

And my inner goddess agrees.