Books to read after 50 Shades

Posted by Jenny

I enjoyed the media hype surrounding 50 Shades. (Tom Hardy to play Christian Grey!) You’d think it was the first naughty book ever written. It certainly was a book with a tasteful non-embarrassing cover. There was no picture of a woman with her head back, hair whipping in the wind, her neck exposed with closed eyes and pouty puffed up lips open, gasping for air while a man with his muscly torso on display has his nose almost buried in her sizeable décolleté, but not without showing of the chiselled panels of his face while managing to wrap his arms the size of my thighs around her. Usually the woman has her arms pushed out as if she’s unsure whether she’s receptive of the man’s attentions. I wonder if books with these type of covers have enjoyed an increase in sales since the introduction of electronic book readers. I know that I'm not likely to sit openly in a busy waiting room with a book of a certain genre and an explicit cover. It doesn't matter how much I like to pretend that I don't care what people think.

As the fantasy reader of the trio, I have read my fair share of, as my husband puts it: vampire porn. They follow the same recipe, ie boy meets girl, girl usually doesn’t immediately like boy. Boy does his level best to win girl over by showing his hidden gentle side before biting girl. Boy then proceeds to ehm… take the girl repeatedly to never before experienced heights until reader wonders how girl is still able to walk. Then a seemingly insurmountable crisis separates boy and girl before they realize it’s not that big a deal and make up in some spectacular fashion. A guaranteed easy read that you can dip in and out of in between work 5 days a week, cooking dinner at home, changing nappies, kissing better bumped heads and scraped knees, bedtime stories, preparing lunch boxes, laundry, dishwasher, gym, tea with hubbie. I might have left out a few things.



 For those of you who enjoy a decent bit of cheesy excapism, I quite like the world Kresley Cole has created in her books. Her paranormal world “the Lore” is detailed and attractive. The “Loreans” consist of Valkyrie, Lykae, Witches to name but a few and they’re described as a separate immortal species that live amongst humans. Every 500 years or so a culmination of events leads to an Accession during which many immortals will be destroyed, but also new alliances will be formed. I like “Lothaire”, probably because the hero in this book starts off as a “baddy” who doesn’t really quite redeem himself. At the end of the book he’s still a bastard. Beware some of the covers though…. And book titles!

(Top illustration by photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/sofi01/4398505356/">sofi01</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">cc</a>