Across the soft-porn pages

Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been bought for another purpose.
 
The Guardian dedicated their usually reliably highbrow Review section to the phenomenon, persuading some hilariously unexpected writers (Will Self! Jeanette Winterson! Lol!) to have a go at their own sex scenes. I couldn’t face reading them, but you can here. And if you’re really into masochism, here’s an angry blogpost Alastair Campbell wrote about how ‘crap Guardian editing’ ruined his own effort.
 
Erika Mitchell (the real woman behind E.L. James) was profiled in the Sunday Times and Telegraph – the latter a brilliantly snooty piece in which we learnt that Mitchell ‘drives a Mini, her favourite tipple is Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc – around £8 a bottle – and she loves eating Nutella with a spoon.’ Her house, in case you’re wondering, is ‘rather ordinary … a slightly neglected garden, a comfy living room complete with mismatching sofas, a kitchen with a worn laminate floor. It is hardly the stuff of dreams.’ If you’re finding it hard to stomach, spare a thought for her two teenage sons.
 
Aside from the madness, there was a scattering of reviews for Simon Armitage’s Walking Home (which Adam Thorpe described as ‘the comic routine’ to the ‘straight act’ of Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways) and a new biography of Titian (‘a sober, probing account … which should endure as the standard Life for the next century’ – Jackie Wullschlager).
 
The Telegraph, meanwhile, managed to find space for one of those yawn-a-minute celeb summer reads features. What are we to make of the fact that Michael Gove plans to read HHhH, a pretentious French novel about the assassination of Nazi radical Reinhard Heydrich? And much as I respect Roy Hodgson and his tireless campaign to bring Stefan Zweig to the masses, someone needs to find him something else to read.
 
Elsewhere, there was a subtly snide article in the Observer magazine about how Brooklyn has become a ‘writers’ mecca’ or, in the words of one of its former inhabitants, ‘cancerous with novelists’. I particularly enjoyed the interviews with saddo stalkers, including a British woman who appears to have moved to Brooklyn solely to perve on writers: ‘Paul Auster in the Second Street Café, or Siri Hustvedt in the Café Moutarde … Jhumpa Lahiri – I’m a big fan of hers. I’ve seen her pushing her buggy in Fort Greene.’ The sort of piece that makes you thankful to live in a hotbed of philistinism.