{"id":10584,"date":"2007-08-10T22:22:37","date_gmt":"2007-08-11T02:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/10\/10584.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:55","slug":"book-report-the-hallowed-hunt-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/10\/book-report-the-hallowed-hunt-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Hallowed Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Having recently reread both The Curse of Chalion<\/a> and Paladin of Souls<\/a>, I thought I may as well finish up and reread The Hallowed Hunt<\/a>. And so I did.\n

It was fun, a perfectly entertaining book. I don’t have any insight on reading it a second time, other than that the hints of Our Hero’s masochism are a trifle queasy-making.\n

You know, thinking about it, there’s an odd thing about this sort of book, by which I essentially mean genre-ish action\/adventure books, Ms. Bujold’s or Mr. Crichton’s or Mr. Ludlum’s or Mr. Scalzi’s. Our Hero (in books of this sort) can have a thing for red-haired women, he can have a thing for long-legged women, for busty women, for slender women, for muscular women, for long-haired women, for mature women, for brainy women—he can be attracted to (or vulnerable to) almost any particular variety of female charms. But he can’t have a thing for (f’r’ex) cunnilingus. He can’t be into bondage, or public places, or spanking, or even prefer a particular position. Or at least, none of that will be admitted to in the book, or have any bearing whatsoever on his relationships with actual women. Our Heroine, in books that have them, is even more constrained, as she can be attracted to smart guys, big guys, older guys, dangerous guys, sweet guys ... but not (generally) guys with tight bottoms or enormous privates or other relevant assets. And she certainly can’t have actual sexual preferences.\n

Now, some of that is necessary because putting in the actual sex scenes involved would turn the book into a different kind of book altogether, and I understand that and am fine with it. But you can have a sexual relationship with some specificity even without<\/I> having the actual scene where the sex takes place. That is, when Our Hero, who really is into getting blown, discovers that the Bad Girl gives really marvelous head, and loves to do it, and is betrayed by that seeming compatability into her clutches, etc, etc, the reader doesn’t need to have the sex actually described, any more than we need to have it described when the exact same scenario happens without any specifics at all. There are plenty of ways to get around it.\n

The result of all this vagueness, I think, is a general sense (in these books, and in the world, because I’m not really blaming the books) that any two good people are compatible, mostly because neither good person will have any actual sexual preferences of any kind. Now, it’s possible that the real world is actually like that—not that people don’t have sexual preferences and interests, but that a couple who are more or less compatible will find sexual fulfillment even if one likes to have hot candle wax on dripped on his thighs and the other finds that a turn-off. Not only are there accommodations, compromises, acquiescences, but there is a kind of synergy (if you’ll excuse the word) involved in a good relationship. She may not get off on tickling, but she may get off on his being tremendously aroused, and the tickling accomplishes that, so there it is. Or rather, she may not get off on tickling, but she may get off on tickling him<\/I>. Which is interesting, and human, and you won’t read about it in this sort of book. Despite some fairly clear hints.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having recently reread both The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, I thought I may as well finish up and reread The Hallowed Hunt. And so I did. It was fun, a perfectly entertaining book. I don\u2019t have any…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16217,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10584\/revisions\/16217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}