This is All I ask by Lynn Kurland, though it really has nothing to do with the book which is just a historical romance. Years ago, my wife and I started our own little book club with just the two of us. I’d ask her to read something that I adored, she’d do the same, and then we’d talk about the books. This book fell well, well outside my comfort zone in almost every respect.

There was nothing wrong with the novel. It was a perfectly serviceable example of the genre. I did not know this at the time because it was the first romance novel I’d read period. And that was the real challenge: reading something that some part of me believed I wasn’t allowed to read. But I picked it up because duty and honor both demanded it. (She’d slogged through Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, which I’ve come to understand is not nearly so charming or insightful to a thirty-something woman as it was to me as a teenager.)

But read it I did. And despite wanting to reject it on that basic gendered principle that said I should do so, I finished it. And in the end, when it came time to discuss it…well I did not give a charitable assessment. But that assessment was built on how the lessons learned by the protagonists throughout the book - how to be more independent for the female lead, how to accept that he was no longer a man of action from the male - was thrown out. It wasn’t just a lazy way to end things with a happily ever after, the end also undermined all of that character growth.

I’m proud of reading that book because that was the first time I really allowed myself to break the rules of my assigned gender and approach some small, trinkety part of life with an open mind where I judged something for what it really was rather than letting the odd social rules dictate my response for me.