Books

I've been absolutely obsessed lately with Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series. The problem with it is that there's no good way to recommend it to people without them judging you some kind of sexual deviant. This is how I tried to explain what I was reading to C:

M: Well, there's this semi-orphan who grows up and finds out that she's marked by a god and is really into pain and submission...
C: So it's an S&M romance novel?
M: No! It's totally fantasy, because she's also trained to be a spy while being a courtesan...
C: There's a half-naked lady on the cover, and she's a courtesan? It's a romance novel.
M: It doesn't have nearly enough sex to be a romance novel!
C: ...

It is a romance novel in the sense that Twilight is a romance novel, except this heroine could actually have been conceived after the feminist revolution and isn't waiting for some freaking vampire to go save her ass all the damn time.

The blog that made me curious enough to borrow it from the library has a better, more humorous description of it here. However, even if you like the first book, you should stop after reading the second book. I've read the first four, and the plots get less and less believable, and this is a Fantasy series we're talking about. K.C. only likes the first two books as well - she got stranded at our place after the Iceland volcano blew up, and we were talking about these books, and I totally think she's a deviant now.