Reading in the dark ...

I am back

I've been sick (while on holiday... lucky me) for a while and I'm still recovering. Nothing serious, just a bad cold that doesn't go away. I am still suffering from nasal congestion and I feel a lack of energy, especially today that I'm back at work! Anyway, we've all been ill except for G.  

This short post is just to let you know that I have only 1 big resolution for this new year: 

write more!

This entails writing more here and reading and writing more for my job (part of my job involves writing  papers and articles). I'm also thinking of writing a book but it has to be written in English so I'm carefully pondering the idea. It's a lot of work and at the moment I don't have enough time. I'll be working non-stop until my birthday (early April) when I'll take a break and go to Prague with G. for a few days. After this trip life is going to be like hell (again) until, I guess, end of July. Unless I want to spend August working, the book needs to be postponed. 

So, I'll write more and I also want to catch up with your blogs. 

I hope you had a lovely break.

The dark side of sex

No worries, I'm not going to write about my sexual life which is not of interest to my readers. I'm going to write about a book that I'm reading. 

After Gail's comment, I give it a second try. I deemed it "ridiculous" and now I can't put it down. How strange is this? Basically, in this post I'm contracting myself but I gather you're quite familiar with it. It's an old habit of mine (i.e. closing a blog and then opening another one in less than a month). 

Let's be clear: I'm not saying that it's a good piece of writing. It's not "literature" but this book does have a point if you go beyond the fact that it's poorly written. I know this is not for me to judge as I'm not a native speaker, but I've read masterpieces in English so I kind of know what I'm talking about. 

So? 

The book everyone is talking about is disturbing and yet, after a few pages, I've found myself immersed in it, eager to know "what's going to happen next"... even if it does make me feel uncomfortable. First, it's not a mommy porn. Actually, it started as Twilight fan fiction even though I can't grasp the connections between the two. It's an erotic book which explores (and believe me, it goes into details) a dominant-submissive relationship between a powerful and very attractive man and a college student. Second, it's disturbing if you're not into BDSM and if you're a woman who is (can't you the guess?) the submissive. Third, the success is partly due to the fact that:

 women have the ability to read this kind of material without anybody knowing what they’re reading, because they can read them on their iPads and Kindles 

Got it! I'm reading it in English on my Kindle. Probably I wouldn't read it on my way to work (on the train) in Italian in paperback. I wouldn't read in Italian anyway, it's too explicit and I would blush too often. Forth, it explores the dark side of sex. It doesn't matter if a reader is not into BDSM, the book makes one think about issues of power, control, limits and boundaries. This is, I guess, the appeal of the trilogy.