books to read if you like 50 shades of grey

(Dear Mr Grey: if you are truly so desperate for your girlfriend to eat properly, maybe don’t date a woman who wears a size four?)

It’s a bit like peering into the inside of your dog’s head – if your dog spent 80% of his day pouring out glasses of chilled Sancerre. Oh, and all Christian thinks about is sex and food. Never has the meme #notallmen been more relevant. When he buys her lots of things and she tells him it makes her feel like a whore, he threatens to send her to his therapist to address her self-esteem issues. It’s the same story when she doesn’t answer an email right away, or dares to visit her mother. When she won’t tell him where she is going, he immediately accesses the darknet to pinpoint her location and goes to find her (she loves this). One of the first things Christian does after he meets Anastasia – having slobbered all over her in the interview scene – is order a background check to find out everything about her. It’s not easy to make men’s bits sound sexy, but this phrase makes it sound as if he has worms. And where Anastasia famously bites her lip every two lines to signal arousal, Christian continually “shifts in his seat”. Anastasia is, he says, “one of the few women I’ve met who can sit in silence, which is great”. He wonders if she likes her men the way she likes her tea: black and weak. Whenever Ana leaves the room, even just for two minutes, Christian assumes she’s making out with another man. Instead of lighthearted and repetitive mild S&M, the “love affair” is now the twisted work of an utter psychopath.

Books to read if you like 50 shades of grey