I was on the bus with my two kids this morning. It’s a tough commute – the older one goes to special private school in the western part of the city, and the younger goes to a small public school in the East. I travel a bit west, drop the older one off on a corner where another bus will pass by and take him thirty blocks down. Then I and the remaining boy head off east again to his school. It’s a tough haul, but I have several different versions I use with varying degrees of success.
The first bus we take is one of the busiest: full of university students heading to the water’s edge, and high school students who attend the well-funded public and private schools in Shaughnessy and Dunbar.
A Punjabi man walks on the bus and stands next to me. He’s got the turban, the bracelet, probably a kirpan under his shirt. He’s got a Kobo – an E-reader made by Chapters, the big-name Canadian bookstore. Although I’ve bought the Kobo for my mother, I preferred the Sony E-reader. That was in the past, of course: now I read on my iphone. Perhaps he forgot his glasses: he has the text on almost maximum zoom, so large that even near-sighted I can read it from a fair distance away. Which I’m not; I’m standing right next to him.
And thank Goodness for that! I can’t help but be drawn to the words: a woman is getting down on her knees in front of a nameless man. She caressing him through his dress pants, unzipping his pants, and then he ‘springs free!’
I can’t believe this. Anyone within ten feet can read what this fellow is reading, and he’s standing cheek-to-cheek on an extremely crowded bus.
Soon she’s got him in her mouth, and he’s trying to pull away before he loses control. So she holds on, and sucks even harder.
‘Oh, Grey!’ she says.
Grey? Wait a minute. This man is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, or one of the damn sequels, is what he’s doing!
Is this how bad it’s got? Are regular dudes now shamelessly lapping up bad erotica on the bus?
I wish I understood the Fifty Shades phenom. Grown-up educated women are reading this stuff. My sister-in-law, who’s a damn family doctor, is reading it (although in her defence she borrowed it, so at least she didn’t spend money on it.)
The bus stopped at a major intersection, and he put away his reader and left the bus. I never got a chance to read if Grey came in her mouth. Or if she swallowed.
God, do I want to read it too?
Fess up- have you read this? I have the trilogy but haven’t read them yet so I couldn’t tell you if she swallows or not. You’ve got to read the new Kate Pearce book Simply Voracious. Friggin’ awesome. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had fun with it, if ya know what I mean. Seriously, you must read it.
I’ve tried to read the Twilight books, and not gotten past the first paragraph of any of them. I’ve also looked through random bits of the EL James books, but i can’t get past the bad prose.
You know what? my abhorrence of ‘Fifty Shades’ might be because of when I used to sneak to my mother’s bookshelf and use her Anais Nin books for spank material. ‘Delta of Venus’ was considered pretty highbrow, but holy crap it was smutty: it broke a lot of taboos. Heck, even today it’s pretty extreme.
I’ll look up the Kate Pierce book…
I’ve never heard of Anaïs Nin before. I used to have a lot of that type book that were published in the 1800′s by ‘anonymous’ people but none were very good. I still have ‘My Secret Life’ by Walter. When I was 16, Harlequin’s were my ‘spank’ material, then I upgraded to erotica the following year. Thank you Doubleday Book Club!
I don’t understand the Fifty Shades phenomenon either. Suddenly people who have never picked up a book in their entire life are tweeting and facebooking about how amazing these books are…which kind of gave me the hint to stay away. Why not just watch porn eh rather than torture the brain to go through every single word and then build up scenes in your head. Too much work, I think.
I’ve commented about this before in other threads: EL James found a massive and hitherto undiscovered demographic – people who haven’t read a book in twenty years. They’ve written EL James to tell her just that. It’s an amazing feat, really. I just wish those damn books didn’t have to be the first thing I see when I walk into a bookstore.