Fifty Shades of Grey: Cyndi Lauper should seriously make a song called “Ana just wants to be miserable forever” (My thoughts on Chapter 2)

It’s been quite a while since I posted my thoughts post on the first chapter of Fifty Shades of Grey, so I decided that it was time to do a post on chapter two. As weird as it may sound, I’m actually doing my commentary on chapter two as a part of my preparation for reading and reviewing the first book in Sylvia Day’s book series Crossfire, which in case some of the people reading this are unaware is called Bared to You. Since I’ve heard a lot of people compare the Fifty Shades trilogy to the Crossfire series, I thought it might be a good idea to read and comment on at least one more chapter of Fifty Shades of Grey before I read Bared to You; that being said, here are my thoughts on chapter two.

I’d like to start out by mentioning that reading this chapter in order to review it was a part of my third or fourth attempt at reading the first three chapters of the book. For the most part, my having to start reading the book all over again several times isn’t necessarily a reflection on the book itself. However, I do maintain my opinion that this is a pretty terrible book. I started reading this book the first time back in June I believe, and I was originally going to comment on more than one chapter at a time. Once I actually got started reading the book, I realized how horrible it was and quickly decided that commenting on more than one chapter of the book at a time would probably result in my posts being the longest piece of writing in the history of the written language. Just reading and commenting on one chapter of the book at a time leaves me with a great deal of things to talk and rant about. Unfortunately, I ended up having a lot of health problem starting at the beginning of July that I was dealing with all the way until around the middle of September, which didn’t leave me with enough time where I would be able to read the book and write posts on it since I was constantly surrounded by doctors, nurse, family, friends, etc. during that time. Once I got to a point where I had time to read any books and review them, I got really into reading Emma Chase’s book series Tangled and wanted to start reviewing those books, which are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better than the Fifty Shades trilogy. Long story short, here I am again, finally commenting on chapter two of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Another reason why it has taken me so long to read and comment on this chapter, and this reason is definitely reflection upon the book is the fact that it’s fourteen pages long. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider having a chapter of a book being fourteen pages long to be all that long of a chapter. However, when it comes to this particular chapter, it seemed like the chapter was a lot longer than that as I was reading it though. There were times during my earlier attempts to read this book where I got so bored reading this chapter that I literally fell asleep reading it. I would say that it was mostly due to the fact that for most of the chapter I felt like I was reading a written summary of Ana’s daily life, which seems to focus mainly on her mentally dwelling on how embarrassed she felt about interviewing Christian and thinking bitchy thoughts about Kate as she tried to go about her usual routine of going to work at Clayton’s Hardware Store, working on her schoolwork, and hanging out with Kate and another friend of hers, José. 

Even when the chapter included actual conversations that Ana had with the other characters in the book, the conversations were all so brief and meaningless for the most part that I was left wondering what the point of including those conversations in the book was to begin with. Honestly, at times I really did feel like I was reading a poorly written summary of a book on Wikipedia or some other website rather than reading an actual book with a plot that moved at a steady pace and the conversations were actually interesting and added something meaningful to the book as a whole. That’s definitely not what I would consider riveting entertainment when you’re reading a book.

It wasn’t until towards the end of the chapter when Christian shows up at Clayton’s that I felt like I was reading an actual book and the story finally seemed to be going somewhere. One of the reasons why I say that would be because we were also introduced to Paul Clayton, a friend and former coworker of Ana’s at that point in the book as well. Ana’s interaction with Paul showed that there are men who seem to be romantically interested in Ana for reasons that I can’t even begin to understand since she comes across as a horrible person to the reader at least. This part of the book also really showcases Christian’s creepy and possessive attitude regarding Ana for the first time since he goes from being at least somewhat charming and nice to acting rather cold to her simply because he saw her talking to another man that she’s just friends with.

Ana continued to come across as being incredibly unlikable, as well as being both emotionally and socially stunted in this chapter, especially when it comes to the thoughts she has about Kate, who as far as I can tell seems like a very nice person. It also really annoys me that she makes such a big deal about being so embarrassed about how the interview with Christian went when as far as she knew; she was never going to see him again. Don’t get me wrong, I can definitely relate to being in a situation where I end up embarrassing myself when I’m interacting with someone and then dwelling on it for a few days. I think the key difference between me and Ana is that if I end up embarrassing myself when I’m interacting with someone that I know I’ll probably never see again, I might beat myself up for a little while, but I’ve usually moved on from the whole situation the next day. It’s only when I embarrass myself in front of someone that I know I’ll definitely have to see again that I might have hard time moving on from the whole ordeal. However, if whoever I’d previously ended up embarrassing myself with doesn’t say anything about whatever it is that I said or did and they don’t treat me any differently than they usually have, I’m able to move on after that. I definitely can be overly dramatic about things at times, but Ana takes the entire concept of being overly dramatic about things to a whole new level that’s just ridiculous beyond words.

The writing in this chapter is incredibly inconsistent at times, and it really makes me think that both E.L. James and whoever was in charge of editing the book when they were preparing to publish it didn’t even care enough about the book to even bother making sure that the story remained consistent at all. When Ana got home from interviewing Christian and Kate tells her that she expected Ana to get home sooner, she tells Kate that she thought that she had made good time given the fact that the interview lasted longer than she was expecting it to. When Ana was internally complaining in the first chapter about how Kate had convinced her to go interview Christian on her behalf for the school newspaper despite the fact she already had a lot of stuff that she had to do that day, she mentioned that she was supposed to be working that afternoon. However, when she shows up at work in this chapter, her boss tells her that she wasn’t expecting her that day. Ana told her that she could work for a few hours since the interview hadn’t lasted as long as she thought it was going to originally.

That all left me feeling more confused than watching an episode of Lost usually did, and I don’t even know where to begin talking about that. First off, because all those inconsistencies, I have no idea whether or not Ana was actually supposed to be working that day. Second, all that inconsistency not only made E.L. James come across as a lousy writer who can’t even be bothered to pay attention to her own writing; it also makes Ana seem like she’s completely determined to make her own life miserable and unnecessarily stressful. When she got home from work, she was once again complaining about all of the schoolwork that she still had to finish and about having to interview Christian, all of which she seems to be trying to blame Kate for. If I had to guess, it sounds like Ana could have not gone to work that day, staid home and worked on all of the schoolwork that she apparently had to do, and yet she chose to go to work anyway. That really bothered me, because people blaming others for all of their own problems and unhappiness is a major pet peeve of mine. Ana simply seems like a miserable person who’s incapable of taking responsibility for her own actions.

It’s at this point that I’d like to also mention that I did see the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, and I actually liked it so much that I saw it twice on opening day. Personally, I’d say that it’s definitely a rare example of a movie being better than the book it’s based on. What I think really helped make the movie better than the book is that the audience wasn’t privy to all of Ana’s whiny and bitchy thoughts, such as the ones in this chapter like Ana referring to Kate asking about how the interview with Christian went as “the Katherine Kavanagh Inquisition”. Ana’s weird hatred towards blonde wasn’t even featured in the movie either, which is something that I don’t even understand in the first place.

Plus, the fact that Ana’s very vocal subconscious and her ultra quirky Inner Goddess weren’t featured in the movie either really made Ana seem much more likable and grounded in the reality. It’s also one of the things that went a long way to making the movie as a whole a major improvement upon the book. I also thought that Ana seemed like a much stronger person and not a complete and total doormat, which was another thing that really helped make her a much more likable character than she is in the book. I know that some people have issues with Jamie Dornan’s portrayal of Christian Grey, but I personally thought that he did a great job. Plus, I’d say that given the fact that the source material for the movie is incredibly weak and beyond terrible in the first place, Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson both did the best they could with what they had to work with.

All things considered, this was definitely a hard chapter to get thorough when I was reading it, mainly because it feels beyond tedious and doesn’t really move the story forward all that much until the end of the chapter when Christian shows up at Clayton’s. It really does feel more like a plot summary than a book. Even if this were actually a plot summary of a book instead of an actual book, I’d say that it would be a pretty mediocre plot summary since this chapter spends a lot of time talking about rather mundane aspects of Ana’s life. Given the fact that I think Ana is a very unlikable person; I’m definitely not interested in reading about every aspect of Ana’s life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to having characters in a story intentionally being written in a way that portrays them as horrible people. After all, like I said in my post on chapter one (My thoughts on Chapter 1), when it comes to what my favorite TV shows are, my favorite comedy is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. A big part of the show’s premise is that the characters are all horrible people. However, the difference between the characters on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Fifty Shades of Grey is that they are portrayed as being horrible people and yet the show is hilarious and fans of the show, like me, want to watch it and love the characters anyway despite them being terrible people. When it comes to Fifty Shades of Grey, I don’t think it was E.L. James’ intention to portray Ana and Christian as being horrible people though. As far as I’m concerned, E.L. James is simply too bad of a writer to even know how to write a likable protagonist or a likable love interest for the protagonist in this book or any story for that matter.