Fifty Shades of Grey

50 written works that are more erotic than Fifty Shades of Grey:
1. This sentence.
2. The obituary section of your local paper.
3. My last grocery list (Oooh...zucchini).
4. A seventh grade essay on Of Mice & Men.
5. The Obamacare bill.
6. The lyrics to Justin Bieber's opus, "Baby" (Baby baby baby ooh baby).
7. A note that reads "Will you go to Prom with me? Check yes or no."
8. The book of Leviticus.
9. An itemized check from a nice dinner out.
10. Box scores from a baseball game.
11. That crude piece of graffiti scrawled on the wall by your house.
12. Comments on YouTube videos.
13. Kirk/Spock slash.
14. The letters from readers published in People Magazine ("Thank you for such a nice piece on Jennifer Aniston!")
15-50. Everything. EVERYTHING.

Alright, I ran out of steam a bit there. But I still had more steam than the limp brained protagonist Anastasia Steele (ugh) and her robotic and laughably verbose suitor Christian Grey (UGH).

This book is so bad. Which, we knew it would be, right? WRONG. It is so much worse than you could imagine. Housewives of America! Step away from the washing machine and put down this book! If you are really craving some poorly written smut lacking any plotting or character development, may I introduce you to something called pornography? Look it up.

E.L. James, I am now dumber for having read your book. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

0 "steely grey eyes" out of 5.

The Help and Mockingjay - a Books with Birds on the Covers Twofer

So you'd *think* that these books have nothing in common. One is the final book in a trilogy about an emo girl with badass archery skills fighting an evil government, the other is about...holy crap as I am writing this I realize it's about an emo girl with badass writing (interviewing?) skills fighting an evil social system. My system of pairing books together based on the animals on their covers WORKS.

Anyway, the battle against the evil social system that was segregation in Mississippi in the 1960s was definitely the more compelling of the two. The Hunger Games trilogy could not have ended on more of a whimper. One of the evil forces Katniss had to fight against was black goo. GOO. Goo doesn't have the villainous charisma of a pudgy bigoted socialite like Hilly Holbrook. Anyway, read the first two Hunger Games books, spare yourself the last one which is fighting goo but mostly just sitting around like a whiny B saying "Gale, Peeta, Gale, Peeta". Read Battle Royale instead - now *that* was a book about high school students fighting each other to the death!

Oh, just see the movies when they come out.

Mockingjay: 1 sad-sack emo angst-filled teenage inner monologue out of 5 (except really 5 out of 5 of those because that is all the book is! But also, it's terrible. So, 1 out of 5).

The Help: 3 WASPY bridge parties out of 5.