User Profile

I do appreciate when I walk away from a book on a subject I previously thought I was well-informed about with just a little more knowledge than I had going into it. Sure, a lot of this book will be familiar territory to your garden variety eurocentric history buffs, but there's still some trivia nuggets buried in here to make it worth your time.

For me, it was the focus on how the first parliaments (as we recognize them) formed in northern Spain at the beginning of the Reconquista, a handful of decades before all that Magna Carta business. I also took for granted that the current conclave system for selecting a new pope was just how it was always done, which is decidedly not the case. Also came across a fun anecdote about a 1791 election in Québec that was open to "all" property owners over the age of 21. "A man entered the polling place only to be told that he could not vote because his property was in his wife's name. Red-faced, he was ordered to bring her to the polls, since she was the qualified voter in their family."

The last third of the book focuses on the post-1945 era of "monitory democracy," which kind of lost me for a bit. The author was arguing that in a new age of watchdog agencies and other NGOs democracies are held more accountable than ever and are appropriately responsive to the desires of the people they govern over. It's hard for me to accept that at face value when the state of democracy across the world seems so precarious at the moment with hardly any heads of state boasting approval ratings in the black. There is discussion about rising competition from autocratic top-down nations, but not as much prognosticating about what the future of democracy might look like for my tastes. Still, an overall concise summary of the central subject that I can confidently say this is exactly what it says on the tin.

Sometimes you just like something. I see lots of other people making valid complaints about this book - character names are repeated too many times, there's no dialogue, too many characters with not enough time to develop or change, sparse prose, chapters were too formulaic, etc. - and I acknowledge that all of that is present. And I still don't care about any of that because my enjoyment from reading this book outweighed any of its flaws.

I appreciate ambitious characters who know exactly what they want and their only source of conflict are the things stopping them from getting it. A character that will bulldoze their way from point A to point B damning the consequences in the process is someone I want to follow and observe (from a safe distance). We have that in droves here in this book that takes place over a two-day, under-18 girls boxing tournament. That's something I've never even stopped to wonder if it exists, and I think that kind of heightens the emotions; there's a sort of built-in tragedy over the fact that these girls are risking their bodies over a prize that most people even in their own social circles care nothing about.

Before the first chapter even begins the reader is met with a tournament bracket showing the starting eight contestants and the first round matchups. Already I'm hooked.

Eight protagonists for a <250 page book is admittedly a lot, and by design we won't be spending too much time with the losers who won't go on to the semifinal matches. But it just worked for me. The author doesn't give herself much time to introduce them so their backgrounds and motivations are woven in-between the flashes of the literal boxing matches we're watching. At times it felt a little too detached from the action and I typically am not the biggest fan of third-person omniscient narration for this reason... but it just worked for me here.

This isn't a book a lot (or maybe even most) people would enjoy, but as someone who typically doesn't try reading contemporary/non-genre fiction, I was engaged throughout. This did result in possibly our most contentious book club discussion to date (two people DNF'ed it), but this is a case where I will stand my ground and say yes, the haters are wrong.

Also, #TeamRachel

Sometimes I delude myself into thinking that I'm well-informed about the world around me, and then I stumble across a story about a true event that happened during my lifetime that I can't believe I've never heard of. This book, which reads like an extended journalistic deep dive, served as my exercise in humility today.

Slavery is one of those things that we like to pretend rests firmly in the past but we all secretly know is still going on. In India, with their caste system being what it is, it doesn't look the same as the transatlantic slave trade did with mass forced migration and metal chains. Instead it's more like a series of impossible debts that can never be paid off, and an understanding that a lower-caste individual will physically labor for a higher-caste person for the rest of their below average lifespan. Culturally, people in this situation might not even recognize this as slavery the way Westerners do, which presents a further challenge to NGOs trying to combat this.

In 2000, an entire village of slaves in Sonbarsa, Uttar Pradesh rose up in a "peaceful revolution" to overthrow their landlords without violence and renamed the place Azad Nagar or "Freedomville". It was held up as a template for similar communities in different parts of the world, and after years of teaching about it to her students the author decided to visit and meet these revolutionaries in person 15 years after their victory. Instead, she was met with an animated crowd of old timers that basically said, "no, we killed those sons of bitches, and we're proud of it."

Tonally, there's a bit of odd pearl-clutching that follows that initially reads like, "How could these slaves be so violent towards their masters?", but later morphs into a more appropriate, "How did the true story get twisted into this sanitized version?" The villagers of Freedomville don't seem to be economically better off today, but ironically their former masters are also struggling as the landlord caste has all been muscled out of their traditional lands by multinational corporations with more powerful machinery. Apparently the cure for slavery is to make it uneconomical with new technology that's cheaper than human labor. Kinda feels like no one came out on top in this case though.

You've seen this story before even if you don't think you have. A money-obsessed businessman from the big city comes to a small town with the intention of making a quick buck on an investment property, ends up falling for a local, then has to decide if he cares more about profit or love. The twist here is that it's gay, and set in a real-world small town about 15 minutes from my house.

Vince takes some getting used to as a protagonist, but I don't think he's meant to be likeable from the get-go and he does go through a transformation by the end of the book. After an adolescence of being bullied for being effeminate, he overcompensates as an adult and tries to present as overly-masculine as possible as a defense mechanism. A string of career setbacks and a promising business opportunity brings him back to his hometown after some 15 years, and he runs into - and is forced to ask favors of - his estranged friend from high school he had an unrequited crush on. There's a bit of bad blood here and Tack, for his part, is willing to bury the hatchet, but Vince can't let things go that easily.

Things pan out predictably from there, though I do feel that the central romance developed quicker than I was expecting. Also the biggest source of conflict between the two leads showed up fairly late in the plot and was resolved sooner than I would allow were I in their situation. But maybe I'm just a sucker for drama. In any case, this is a low-stakes romance book with thirty-something protagonists and some realistic open door suckin' and fuckin' if you're tired of sanitized YA tenderqueer stories.

While reading as a hobby is enjoyable for the most part, its inevitable that most books will fall in the middle of the bell curve in terms of quality. But sometimes you get lucky and accidentally find something at the extreme end. To me, this was a masterpiece, and I feel fortunate that I've lived long enough to come across this work, there's no other word I can think of.

Not everyone will get the same mileage out of this that I did though. What we have here is a historical military novel (a genre I enjoy) set on an aircraft carrier (a niche interest of mine) with detailed descriptions of ship-to-ship aerial combat (also right up my alley), all overlaying one of the most emotional and accurate gay romances I've ever read. It being set during the Pacific theater of WWII, there are some pretty notable character deaths that surprised me, and I found myself genuinely worrying about the two leads during the climax in a way few books have been able to make me feel.

Of course parts of this book will seem dated; the hyper-masculine setting results in a lot of displays of eye roll-inducing macho culture and there are anti-Japanese slurs out the wazoo. But I still appreciate that this book was written at all when it was, and about men in a time and place where they couldn't be open about themselves. You could feel the danger in each clandestine rendezvous and the ending - though bittersweet - still feels hard-fought and earned by the protagonists.

Further heightening how this book affected me was its history that I looked up after finishing it; the author published it in 1979 to a weak reception, and largely gave up on writing after that. By chance he discovered in 2011 that it had developed a cult following for being an early work of gay fiction, which inspired him to get it re-published and start working on a spin-off novel. Unfortunately he passed in 2024 before he could finish it, which I'm genuinely bummed out about.

It's been almost a week since I've finished this book, and I'm still thinking about specific individual scenes all this time later. Fred and Jack will probably be bouncing around the back of my head for some time yet, and I don't mind one bit.