Exist Yesterday.

Some scattered thoughts on Fifty Shades of Grey which you probably shouldn’t bother with because I haven’t read it so this is all just me talking out of the back of my neck:

Haven’t books like this been around forever, or am I the only one who would get really nervous and excited as a teenager when visiting a new mall and the B. Dalton had a little section for Anonymous right at the start of Fiction?
Chatter about it being the first bestseller of the ereader age should take into account the vastly different ways in which people consume books (regardless of platform) in different places. I’m thinking of the East Coast commonplace that ereaders encourage the sale of trash because no one can tell that’s what you’re reading, but that presumes a culture where people read in public. They don’t here; partly because there are just so many fewer public spaces, but also because you can’t read and drive at the same time. (Though audiobooks are just as private as ereaders, and have been for decades.) To the extent reading is a social activity outside the East Coast metro hubs, it’s because people talk about what they read.
And Fifty Shades seems to be a genuine word-of-mouth hit (or it was; once these things achieve a certain escape velocity they’re self-perpetuating, to mix metaphors I don’t fully understand). Which is what really weirds me out: maybe I just don’t move in very broad social circles, but I just can’t imagine people who aren’t interested in BDSM themselves approvingly recommending a series of books about BDSM to people who as far as they know aren’t interested in BDSM either. (This may be why I suck at reader’s advisory: my own literary tastes are so sharply delimited that I lack the resources to envision a reader willing to try anything so long as it’s popular.) Is this what the 70s were like, with suburban squares going to see Deep Throat en masse just to stay up on the zeitgeist?
I’m probably projecting my own experience of erotic fiction onto it, but over a thousand pages seems like way too long to want to spend in the company of someone else’s private fantasies unless they’re a really remarkable prosodist. Then again, maybe that’s why I’m single.