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May. 13th, 2010 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreI'm reading this book - another one of those books that I put on hold and them promptly forgot why I wanted it - called Exchange of Hostages by Susan R Matthews. It is...odd. So, it's the future (or at least humanoids-in-space), right, and the future is horrible and dystopic and fascist, and our main character is a student at the training academy for Inquisitors, who are government-sanctioned torturers. His name is Andrej. Also, there are certain criminals who get to serve out their sentences as, basically, slave-soldiers, and each of the Inquisitor-students gets one bound to him/her for their training period. Andrej has a weirdly intense relationship with his that involves a lot of non-sexual touching and symbolically important knives.
At this point, I'm kinda wondering if this is one of the books I put on hold because I read somewhere that the author came out of fandom.
It's one of those books that you don't really feel like you can actually recommend to people, as it's weird and offputting and there is, y'know, a lot of torture. And I cannot honestly tell you if the book is any good. It might be! I can't tell! Because it is apparently hitting a whole bunch of my id-fic buttons and that sort of thing inhibits my ability to distinguish quality. The experience of reading it reminds me a lot of reading Anne Bishop's Dark Jewels books - it's vaguely ridiculous and you feel kinda like you're eating a huge amount of something tasty but bad for you and probably you don't actually want to admit that you're reading it to other people but you can't stop reading. And then, y'know, maybe you buy the ridiculous book so you can read it again whenever you want.
This time, at least, the books have less embarrassing covers (and titles) than the Anne Bishop books.
My library does not have any more of the series after the first one. I think I can get the used paperbacks pretty cheap, though.
Tell me about your embarrassing guilty pleasure books. We can feel suitably ashamed of ourselves together!
At this point, I'm kinda wondering if this is one of the books I put on hold because I read somewhere that the author came out of fandom.
It's one of those books that you don't really feel like you can actually recommend to people, as it's weird and offputting and there is, y'know, a lot of torture. And I cannot honestly tell you if the book is any good. It might be! I can't tell! Because it is apparently hitting a whole bunch of my id-fic buttons and that sort of thing inhibits my ability to distinguish quality. The experience of reading it reminds me a lot of reading Anne Bishop's Dark Jewels books - it's vaguely ridiculous and you feel kinda like you're eating a huge amount of something tasty but bad for you and probably you don't actually want to admit that you're reading it to other people but you can't stop reading. And then, y'know, maybe you buy the ridiculous book so you can read it again whenever you want.
This time, at least, the books have less embarrassing covers (and titles) than the Anne Bishop books.
My library does not have any more of the series after the first one. I think I can get the used paperbacks pretty cheap, though.
Tell me about your embarrassing guilty pleasure books. We can feel suitably ashamed of ourselves together!
