March 2012

Now that I have finished the Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy I feel like I need to at least give a final review.
In a nutshell:
Book One – Awesome
Book Two – Even Better
Book Three – Somewhat disappointing

The plot of book three was not quite as addicting as the first two books. Everything became a bit repetitive, especially the sex scenes. I was so bored reading those parts that I actually found myself skipping ahead and sparing myself from reading the same thing over and over. With that being said, I still liked the trilogy overall and was not surprised to read today that the books are going to be made into movies. However I was very surprised to read that the author received 5 million dollars to bring the books to the big screen. Wow. Wonder how much Stephenie Meyer received for the Twilight saga then? My guess would be 20 times as much.

More importantly…who do you think should play the sexy control freak Christian Grey?

My top 3 picks:

Bradley Cooper

Ben Affleck

Jake Gyllenhaal

Who do you think should play Christian Grey?

Okay, I am so confused and can not seem to research this book fast enough! It all started Tuesday morning when I recorded Good Morning America so I could listen to the interview of rejected Linzi. I ended up watching the segment on this crazy popular trilogy of books called Fifty Shades, which I had never heard of until then. The books are being referred to as mommy porn and well, sex sells right? The first book is Fifty Shades of Grey it’s 528 pages and I read it in two days. O.M.G. Even last night during these crazy storms where my daughter couldn’t quite possibly sit any closer to me…I couldn’t put my iPad down. Then last night I went up to bed my eyes were getting heavy so I finally gave in and went to sleep with 93% of the book finished. Something woke me up at 4am and I actually finished the book and then went back to sleep.

I have already purchased book 2 on my Ipad – Fifty Shades Darker and plan on diving in as soon as I feed these munchkins of mine.

I read some of the reviews on Amazon and GoodReads on the first book and I am finding that people either love this book or hate it, with probably 75% loving it.

Supposedly…and this is where I am just so shocked, the basis of the books come from Fan Fiction for the Twilight books. If you don’t know what Fan Fiction is, basically it’s where people take books and create their own stories from characters or settings from other published books. The author, EL James, had created fan fiction from Twilight called – Master of the Universe. It was based on Edward and Bella set several years into the future. Basically Edward and Bella – the sex story. There are even pretty racy videos on Youtube, just do a search. Apparently her writing received such a large following that she was advised to take the writings off the internet and turn them into books. However the Fifty Shades Trilogy has no mention of vampires. The author had to rewrite much of the Fan Fiction to make sure the books did not resemble the Twilight series. And honestly I would have never connected the two myself. If anything I kept thinking of a Rated X version of Pretty Woman, minus the whole hooker thing.

Sure there is the withdrawn, sexy, wealthy, controlling, broken Christian (sound like Edward?) and the desperate, inexperienced, immature, insecure Anastasia (umm, Bella much?)…but the story just doesn’t ring Twilight to me. It is much different and moves much faster than Twilight. It certainly doesn’t take 4 books for these two to have sex for the first time. You The “mommy porn” as people are calling it is written very well (and not really that bad, I guess that will depend on the person though), but some other parts of the book are very repetitive (like the words that Ana and Christian use to communicate with one another) and really just odd for lack of a better word. But there is something about the characters and their obsessive relationship that make you keep reading and reading and never wanting to stop. I dare ya, give it a shot. You’ll be hooked too!

Good luck trying to find the books in print, they are sold out everywhere, including Amazon. If you have an e-reader, you are in luck. $30 (for all 3 e-books) is worth to me. Now I’m just trying to decide if I should keep visualizing Christian as the guy that I have imagined for the past 528 pages or if I should switch to Edward?? Tough decision.

While I absolutely love having an iPad to read books on I really miss buying books. Whenever I’m at Target I always seem to find myself walking down the book aisle admiring all the pretty book covers. If I had the storage space and money I would buy new books all the time. It’s my dream to redo my office and have Ken build floor to ceiling books shelves on the longest wall available. Although I would then need to buy some more books to fill the shelves…darn!

It’s hard to shop for new Kindle or iBooks to download at times because I really do like to judge books buy their cover. I tend to browse the Top 100 lists and such, but there you find the same authors over and over again. Sometimes I like to find a new author or a unique book that may not be on a most popular list. I find it really helpful to take photos of books when visiting a store and that’s exactly what I did during my last visit to Target. Look at all these beautiful books? Do you recognize any of them? Any recommendations?

Karli loves books as much as me, but I try not too buy too many books for her. We mostly go to the library, usually twice a month to pick out some new books. She constantly picks out books that are a little too hard for her to read. Well she can read them, but it takes forever to finish a book and she likes to read out loud to me. By the time she finishes a 200 page book I am bored to death of the book. I try to make it a rule that the book has to be under 100 pages and if it has a few illustrations here and there even better. I feel like she went from reading fun picture books to these huge chapter books leaving out so many good books in the middle. There are some really cute series of books like Ivy & Bean and Judy Moody that are age appropriate and fun to read.

She picked out some fun books, including some new series of books where we tried to check out just the first book of the series to see if we like it. One thing we like to do (that I did with all my kids when they were younger) is she reads a page and then I read a page. I feel like this really helps with reading fluency and it’s a fun way to spend time together.

The library had a display where you were to answer – What Do You Geek? Karli wrote puppies and of course I wrote Twilight!