The dishwasher is broken, and the stress has induced me to consume cheese.

[snarp]

Kushiel's Dart and The Persian Boy have the same opening.

Is my devotion to genmaicha and Nippon Kodo Mainichi-koh an indicator of low tastes? Like, would Tamaki Suou praise these things in irritating ways?

Comments

[scribbled_lore]

What is this The Persian Boy? Is it a good read?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

It's an old classic Alexander/Bagoas historical RPF novel, and along with other Mary Renault books was the gateway drug for a large number of slash Fangirls d'un Certain Age. (And it is an excellent read, although I am a dirty dirty Hephaistion/Alexander shipper who prefers Fire From Heaven.)

[snarp]

I would advise reading The Persian Boy if you like 1) Kushiel's Dart, and 2) everybody being doomed.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

If that rec also applies in reverse, that may finally be enough to get me to try Carey.

(Historical-AU magical BDSM could be SO VERY MUCH my sort of thing, but the person who first recommended the series to me many years ago had...questionable tastes, at least so far as compatibility with my own nitpicky hard-to-please standards went; so I've been rather wary of giving these a go for fear it would just be like, say, The Belgeriad with a bunch of floggings pastede on yay.)

[snarp]

It also applies in reverse! If you are okay with there being slightly less doom. There's still plenty to go around, especially in the first book, but in general Carey is less likely to kill everyone's true love and ruin their lives. She's a much more humane writer than Renault, in the sense that she sympathizes with all her characters, even the villains and the idiots.

I think Renault always put her sense of the mythic before everything else, which meant more outright cruelty than Carey goes in for. All of which makes sense, given that Carey is in charge of consensual-BDSM-related fantasy. There's also a lot of humor in there, which is not something you see a lot of in Renault.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

While I enjoy Doomy Doom of humorless mythic DOOOOOOOOM in the right mood and from certain sources (Tolkien, wu xia angst, etc.), I am also Very Much OK with lower doom and higher humor levels! It's mostly only high fantasy where I really *need* that sense of doomy mythic elevation to be able to enjoy it, and while the Alexander books pushed those particular buttons much, much better than pretty much any fantasy I've read in ages, it's not something I require from historical novels. And it sounds like the Kushiel books read a lot more like recognizable alt-Europe historical AU with fantasy elements rather than secondary-world high fantasy (which is a good thing, because at this point I'm pretty much allergic to most modern Western fantasy...)