Branson, MO….

Highlights of the trip:  Riding the Ducks, The Winery, Go Karts, Easter Sunday, Acrobats of China, and having to stop at Buffalo Wild Wings so we could see Marquette lose to Cincinnati in the Elite Eight (NOT the outcome we wanted, but so much fun)!

Books: Fifty Shades trilogy by EL James

At the time I was working at the library and the Fifty Shades books were STILL all the rage.  The waitlist for the third book, Fifty Shades Freed, was still long and there was still occasionally a waitlist for the first two books, Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker, because the word was out that there was going to be a Fifty Shades of Grey movie.  Up until Spring Break 2013, I had steadfastly refused to read them because 1) I didn’t want to get caught up in such a crazy trend and 2) so many people had told me I would HATE them because the actual writing was SO BAD.  Keep in mind that I worked in the library, meaning I had no shortage of books to read, so it wasn’t really a struggle to not read them…  Until a couple of my friends read them and started talking about them…  Friends that read books I like, liked the Fifty Shades books???  Whoda thunk?

So, when a friend offered to let me read her copies during Spring Break I took her up on it.  If you haven’t read them yet, I don’t recommend them and I don’t not recommend them.  I enjoyed reading them with a glass of wine on vacation.  They are great mind-candy, escapist reads but I can totally see why people hated them.  If you want to see them as women-hating, abusive, and misogynistic, whatever, you will definitely be able to see all of that.  But if you want to see a love story of two confused young adults written by a first-time author that originated as fan fiction and just read it and enjoy it, then I think you will. I definitely did.

I do have two things that I specifically want to comment on.  First, I loved the story of Christian and Ana.  Did they both make stupid mistakes? Yes. Sometimes they were maddeningly stupid. Are they 20 years old?  Yes.  Almost everyone I know has some pretty cringeworthy stories of love in their 20’s.  So, let’s not throw stones.  Second, the writing is not horrible.  It’s not great, but it’s not horrible.  I found the story engaging enough that it was easy to overlook repetitive sentence structure and the lack of a thesaurus. 

These were fun books to get lost in during Spring Break and it was fun to think back on how adamant I was that I was not going to read them.  Lesson learned.