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Powergamz1 -> RE: Fifty Shades Revisted (8/3/2013 2:40:25 PM)
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There is an excellent compendium of rejection and advice letters that Campbell wrote to aspiring authors who went on to become great talents... I doubt if even he could have straightened out the 50 Shades author's inability to create readable prose.
Setting BDSM aside entirely, it is well below the quality needed for even the cheesiest bodice buster romance novel, and would never have sold without the titillation factor of kink.
quote:
ORIGINAL: njlauren
I didn't find 50 shades all that bad, as a BD/SM book it absolutely sucks, but I don't think that was the point of it *shrug*......I kind of found it a pretty standard romance tale of how love can transform someone. I wasn't as upset as some about making BD/SM people into a bunch of loons, that you had to be nuts to be into this, maybe because I recognized early on that Christian was not into BD/SM, that he found it a work around to his problems but wasn't really into it.....to be honest, I have read much worse written books, or books I hated more , including more than a few 'great books' they claim you should read, "Great Expectations" comes to mind, as do, sorry for fans, books like "Wuthering Heights", and I thought Jane Austen did much better with Zombies and sea monsters......(Dickens to me was a great writer, it is just that book that I hated, wanted to pour gasoline on the characters and light them on fire)....
Sadly, I think I have read all 3 books. I read Les Miserables, or tried to, in French, and I think as a consequence in the past 30 years I have totally lost any French language ability I had in me. The computer book if it is the one I think it is, is probably the nth text of one I read a number of years ago (the title hit me strongly), and yeah, only fit for complete computer geeks and engineers.....and 50 shades is a romance novel with kink sort of grafted on it. I read it long before it became popular, when it was spreading via word of mouth, and I think the negative reaction many are having is because of all the hype by the middle age vanilla people who read it , thinking they are being naughty, that this is BD/SM, and selling it as such, when it is an ok romance story with a kind of standard romance structure to it (the innocent girl saving the injured man, etc, etc),and yeah, it is fantastic, and has its rough spots writing, but then again, try reading modern adult romances, that is what they are about.). It has problems with it, but there is a real story in it, despite being rough at times...
It is funny, people ragged on Stephanie Meyer for the twilight books, that she can't write, that the only people who like it are 12 year old girls..I just read another book by her, The Host, that speaking as someone who has been reading science fiction for a lot of years, was exactly that, and good science fiction (John Campbell of Astounding science fiction , who helped found the modern genre, would approve I think), yet she gets trashed on Goodreads by people who simply say "oh, another Stephanie Meyer book for 12 year olds", don't read it, and trash it. And the books is well written and has a lot of depth to.
My favorite books recently I found through my sweetie, the Kate Daniels Urban fantasy series by Illona Andrews, the Mercedes Thompson books by Patricia Briggs, and the "touched by an Alien" series by Ginny Koch, all of them to me are well written and a lot of fun (the Ginny Koch books have a lot more direct humor in them, the main character is my idol and role model in terms of sardonic humor, but all three of them have their humorous aspects, like a vampire who drives a VW minibus painted like the one in "Scooby Doo" and welding someones weights to their weight bench or nailing their furniture to the ceiling as a sign of romantic interest)
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