Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from Jacqueline Carey

Today, somebody told me how much she loved Kushiel's Dart. I paraphrase, but basically, she says there were important life lessons in there! Deep philosophical stuff! Which got me reflecting on my opinion of the book, which is less than flattering. But then I thought, sure, I learned stuff from that book. Here's what I learned.

1. You don't have to write plot events into a novel, you can just dab on some exposition every hundred or so pages.
2. Mary Sue-ness can be disguised with huge amounts of bad fortune.
3. No one is ever really celibate, except for boring old guys. Hot young knights are just holding out on you for hotter sex.
4. If you are kidnapped by your enemy and sold to pseudo-Germanic barbarians, the ability to give a good blowjob will make your captivity more comfy.
5. If you are sneaking back into your home country for complicated political reasons, the ability to give a good blowjob will keep you from being turned over to the local authorities at inconvenient moments.
6. None of your stuff is ever lost. Your enemies will mail your most prized possessions back to you at the end of the novel, just in case you were thinking of moving on and having a life with, say, the hot young knight who threw over his vows of celibacy to settle down with you.
7. After following our heroine through years of arduous-but-sexy training, months of onerous-but-sexy captivity, and weeks of difficult-but-sexy escape/diplomacy/war, the denoument Carey thinks we're all dying for is all the frothy details about the wedding of two characters we barely know.
8. There is nothing and no one that is not, somehow, sexy.
9. You do not have to buy the next book.