Emma Goto

After visiting my husband's hometown of Shimane last year, I noticed how much the town seemed to love Lafcadio Hearn, a writer who lived in Shimane only for a short 15 months. I also found it ironic that Hearn wrote about Japan (in English) to share Japanese culture with the western world - and yet today his writings seem to be best-known in Japan itself, rather than abroad. (At the very least, I had never heard of him).

However! I did have a couple of commenters let me know that they did know of Hearn, and I told myself I should give myself a bit of self-education on the topic sometime so that I could know of him too, which prompted me to pick up his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Published in 1894, this was the first of many books he published on Japanese culture.

The book starts off with Hearn describing his first impressions upon arriving in Japan. Funnily, it almost bears similarities to what a first-time traveller might experience today - even in the late 1800s, there were already "don't touch this" signs in English (Japan getting tired of the tourists already). And Hearn was enchanted by the the Japanese aesthetic, which he admits is because the text on shopfronts being in Japanese just looks cool (Super Dry, anyone?)

He then heads off to Kamakura and Enshoshima to check out the temples there (a place still much-beloved by tourists) and even the cave down the bottom of Enoshima Island.

One rather topical section for me was when Hearn explained the Sai-no-kawara - a Buddhist story about how children are doomed to stack stones along a river, unable to continue their journey into the afterlife. I had coincidentally first heard of that story just a month prior when I hiked Mt Ono and came across a small shrine with writing about that story on the trail.

Finally he arrives in Shimane. From the town of Matsue he spots Mt Daisen, "a glorious spectre towering to the sky" - which I didn't realise you could see from the town, plus "a beautiful little islet in the lake" or Yomega-shima, a small island on Matsue's Lake Shinji.

Next it's a visit to the Izumo Shrine and a resort town called Inasa. He mentions the "Chihiki-noiha", which I think is a reference to a rock with a torii gate on it, now known as Benten-jima.

He also takes a visit to Shimane's Kaka-no-Kukedo sea caves - which I had never heard of - where the previously mentioned sai-no-kawara story makes a reappearance. In the cave there are statues of Jizo, and many piles of stone - "Only at night do the shadowy children come to build their little stone-heaps at the feet of Jizo". And it is said that in the early morning the little footprints of children can be seen, before they dry up and disappear in the heat of the day.

I actually found this chapter particularly compelling, and it seems like I'm not the only one, as I found a blog post from 11 years ago where a Matsue resident chose to visit those caves, inspired by Hearn. Maybe I'd like to check it out someday too.

Towards the end of the book Hearn goes on a long tangent about the various varieties of supernatural foxes that live in Japan which starts to lose me a little. In Matsue he is known for being a big fan of the Jozan Inari Shrine, which he has a paragraph on earlier in the book - Matsudaira Naomasa of the Matsue Domain established the shrine after a fox spirit came to him and said that he would protect the capital from fire if a house was built for him within the castle grounds.

He also recommends a Inari temple in Yoshiwara, Yokohama which I wouldn't mind checking out, although I'm not sure it exists any longer (AI points out that this area could possibly have been destroyed as a result of the either the Kanto Earthquake or WW2 firebombing). I suppose this fixation on foxes is the starting point of his future writings, as from what I've heard much of his writing ends up being focused on introducing Japanese yokai and other such supernatural tales.

Overall, Hearn had a very positive opinion of the Japanese people. He's surprised how even sailors in Japan - who you might expect to be a little more "rough" - were still very gentle and polite. And that in 14 months in Izumo, he never saw any sort of domestic violence, or raised voices during an argument. He seems to be a little naive in taking this at face value though - when I would think that there would have been for sure plenty of that going on behind closed doors. I would assume that this very positive impression is part of the reason why the Japanese people love him today, though.

Nonetheless this was a rather charming book. I would love to see a side-by-side of his writing, together with what that place he's describing looks like today (if it still exists). It seems even Einstein and Charlie Chaplin had the same idea and were inspired to visit Japan based on Hearn's work. Alas I don't think there is such a thing in English yet, but I would bet there is plenty of resources in Japanese available for that.

After reading Daily Rituals, I figured I’d stay on the same theme and I also picked up My Morning Routine. I feel like it addressed basically all of the criticisms I had with Daily Rituals - namely the lack of diversity, and doing more of an analysis of the things in common with peoples' routines, instead of just showing one routine after another.

It also touches on what it's like to be a parent with a morning routine (for both genders), even some examples of how Ramadan can affect your morning routine, and also how a partner can affect it (since it's not like we tend to do these in isolation) so overall the information in it felt accessible to more people.

As a brief summary of each of the chapters: - How to wake up in the morning - ideally waking up before your alarm, getting in some sunshine, exercise, not using the snooze button and putting your alarm in another room if need be to make sure that you actually get out of bed - Focus and productivity in the morning - don't check your emails the first thing, try and find one important thing to get out of the way first rather than letting notifications from other people dictate your morning for you - Morning workouts - as we all know, exercise is really, really good for you - Morning meditation - that meditation and mindfulness is quite a good thing. For those that are against the idea, even something like focusing on grinding your coffee beans without multitasking on something else is a way to get a bit of mindfulness in - Evening routines - prepare for the next day by laying out your clothes, making a to-do list, cleaning up your home, meditating or journalling to wind-down - Sleep - consistent wake and sleep times - Parents - a chapter dedicated to how children will inevitably impact your morning routine. Waking up before your kids to get in some personal time is good, staying off of your devices so that you are more present, and reminding yourself that this is only temporary - Self-care - giving yourself me-time in the morning, and how having a morning routine can give you a senes of accomplishment to start off the day and is a form of self-care in itself - Different environments - sticking to a morning routine when you are travelling, but really don't beat yourself up if you find that you can't (especially if you are on holiday) - Adaption - you shouldn't feel bad if you can't stick to your morning routine perfectly (and let that negatively impact the rest of your day). At worst, try and focus on completing one or two things, like exercise

The thing I found the most useful was one interviewee mentioned that they have their router settings set to turn the internet off at a certain time. I decided to do the same thing (my internet now turns off at 8pm) which has been a fairly good way to kick us off the TV / laptops at night. Would recommend.

The book is nothing ground-breaking - it’s just giving a bunch of examples of how having a morning routine works for different people. But it can be useful if you need a kick up the butt to improve your own. And it's good if you can find little things that other successful are doing that might jog inspiration for your own morning routine.

This book is a long list of different rituals and morning routines that people followed (mostly famous artists and writers). It mostly skews towards older or long-dead people - I think I would have liked a bit more of a range in time periods so we can take a look at how people manage their routines nowadays with the advent of technology like phones and laptops.

There are also some fun facts that pop up, like how Beethoven always counted his coffee beans (60 per cup) and just generally a lot of alcohol and drug consumption going on. But other than 1 - 2 pages per person, there isn't really anything else to the book. I suppose you are left to draw your own conclusions on what makes a good routine, or to try and find some commonalities between them.

There were also two types of routines in terms of discipline - some believed in writing or doing their art every day, no matter what, while others did it whenever they felt like it. Same goes for early birds or night owls. Quite a few would stop work by dinner and then enjoy the rest of the night with their families, some only did a max 3 hours per day, while others would get hooked on their craft and continue all night. Plenty would take long walks to help spark ideas or for the exercise (not so much running or weight lifting - although I suppose that's a more recent invention).

I found Hemingway's routine also interesting - to stop writing at a place where you know what's coming next, rather than just continuing on with that thread. I'd heard that advice before, but for programming (i.e. don't get into the flow and code all night until you get stuck on a bug - instead you should stop at a place where you know how to solve the next step). It's hard to stop, but makings it easier to get started again the next day.

One thing that did stand out for me was that these people generally only focused on one thing. They might spend some of their time replying to mail and doing admin tasks, but otherwise generally focused on the one thing, and had 1 - 2 sessions of it per day (broken up by a meal). Deep work / focus time is important, and I suppose you can't spread your time too thinly across too many interests, or you won't achieve success?

The author also stepped on a bit of a landmine with this book, as less than 20% of the people he featured were women.

Maybe if you consider the patriarchy, there would have been less successful and famous women 100 - 200 years ago to have sources to refer to for this book. So statistically speaking the percentage might be what you'd expect, but I can also get why reviewers of the book might be disappointed with that.

What stood out to me about this though is how it's taken for granted that these great men are propped up by their wives. One wife worked full-time to pay the bills (to give her husband time to create) and yet she still made him breakfast before she went. And there was another story around how a husband and wife decided to take it in turns in who would get to stay home and write, while the other worked to pay the bills. The wife ended up famous - and the author made the off-hand comment that this meant the husband never got his chance to write. Kind of ironic considering that probably happened to plenty of the hidden women in this story.

It seemed the author did take the criticism onboard and wrote a follow-up book specifically centred around women and their routines.

We live a lot of our lives based off of metrics. You want to get healthy? You might set a weight goal or count calories. However, philosophy professor and author, C. Thi Nguyen, argues that we sometimes focus too much on the metric and lose sight of our original goal. Weight loss doesn't always equal health, for example, and in the author's case led to him eating the same meals every day, as it made it easier to count the calories. This bias towards a specific number is a concept that Nguyen has coined "value capture".

On a larger scale, the world is full of metrics and ranking lists which people try and use to make informed choices - the top universities, the best wine choices. But Nguyen argues that ranking these on a pure number means you lose out on a lot of nuance. Certain universities will be better-suited for certain students, and the wine you should choose should vary depending on what food you pair it with, not the taste on its own. Not to mention universities and winemakers will then focus their efforts on trying to improve their ranking on the list which might come at the detriment of the quality of education, or produce less wine that actually tastes good with food.

The crux of this book is then comparing these metrics to the metrics you aim for in games, which on the surface seem to be the same thing - you try and collect 100 coins in a game of Mario, or you aim to score as many points as possible when you play basketball. But Nguyen tries here to explain how the metrics in games are actually different, and a good thing.

I think if there ever were a person qualified to write a book about philosophy and games, it would have to be this author. He loves board games, video games and in general seems to be quite the collector of hobbies - rock-climbing, yoga, fly-fishing and even yoyo-ing. To be honest I found this part of the book most interesting, and would prefer to learn more about Nguyen and his hobbies rather than the philosophy of value capture that he's trying to get at.

And so his first point about games is that although games have a metric you aim for, they are actually less about the actual outcome. If the goal of basketball is to put a ball in the hoop, you could just walk over to it with a ladder and directly drop it in. Games are more about the rules that the players collectively have decided must be followed for the ball going into the hoop to count. And so in games the process of playing the game itself is tied to the outcome.

He terms this as "striving play" - where you are ultimately trying to reach that goal or metric (win a game, catch a fish) but your purpose is in enjoying yourself with the process along the way. Of course there are exceptions (if you are a professional athlete or genuinely trying to catch a fish to eat it) but generally speaking if you lose a game and don't meet your goal, you don't really mind, because the whole point was the fun of it all.

And he proposes that we should use what we have learned from games to decide how we choose which metrics are important and which are not. Metrics are still useful since there's not enough time in the world to individually decide on everything - we still have to outsource some of our decision-making to other people. In the case of the author, like when buying a fridge - since who has the time to learn the intricacies of what makes a good fridge.

(To be honest the book started to lose me here. Although the subtitle on the cover says "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game", the book doesn't actually have the answers).

The author also argues that chasing metrics and value capturing will give you power socially - in the case of science, publishing more papers is an indicator of success, and so people will game the system instead of being more thorough in their research and publishing fewer (but better) papers. And in the worst-case scenario, the metric-chasers will become socially dominant and we start to lose out on things that can't be summarised into a neat metric.

He finally introduces the concept of "autotelic activity" - activity that is valuable for its own sake (i.e. not tied to a metric or goal at the end of it). Because if you're trying to gain social status or wealth by chasing metrics, at the end of the day, what is the point of it all? And the answer should be that you value the process of chasing a metric - or, playing games.

After reading this book, I felt a bit lost. Although this book at first comes across like a pop-science book or self-help book thanks to Nguyen's personal anecdotes and casual tone, this doesn't go as far as giving you a list of suggestions, or an actual answer to the problem like you might expect a self-help book to do. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I feel like it's just missing something to round it off. Or maybe the problem of chasing metrics isn't something that I really connect with at this stage in my life (if that doesn't make me sound like I'm too full of myself).

Nonetheless though I think it's a solid read, maybe it wasn't just quite for me. I'd love to see Nguyen come back to this in 10 years with a follow-up - maybe with time he will be able to flesh the whole thing out just a tiny bit more.

PS: As a final thing I found amusing, Nguyen is a former food critic and an avid amateur cook. And he seems to have a specific vendetta against cookbooks. Of course he concedes it is very good for someone new to cooking as it provides the exact ingredient breakdowns and step-by-step instructions. But this results in a dish that is the same every time - he recounts a tale where he had 3 separate friends make a ratatouille, and noticed they all tasted the same (because they had all used the same NYTimes recipe). Whereas Nguyen has made ratatouille 10 different ways from all the different cookbooks he owned. Actually I was rather amazed that he's made ratatouille that many times, not to mention he has enough friends that he's had 3 of them make ratatouille (or maybe that's the sort of friend group you develop from being a food critic)?

A fantasy book with some great plot twists. The story centres around Neema, a High Scholar for the Empire who belongs to the Raven faction. The setting of the book is that each person dedicates themself to a particular animal god - a fox, bear, raven, ox, monkey, tiger or hound. There's also the magic-using dragon faction that are kind of mysterious and live on their own little island.

In a way this reminds me of the faction system in Divergent, or like joining a house in Harry Potter. Your faction also determines what sort of work you do, and basically seems to determine your entire personality as well. Foxes are always playing tricks on other people, oxes are sturdy and reliable, the ravens are smart, and so on. In that sense the characters become quite the stereotype, which I don't really like.

Every 24 years, each of the factions choose a candidate and they fight it out amongst themselves to choose the next leader of the empire. Again this seems to call back to some other YA books that do similar things (maybe like Red Rising or Hunger Games - although not quite a fight to the death).

Partway through it also becomes a murder mystery. The author Antonia Hodgson previously wrote historical crime novels (this is her debut Fantasy), so I could take a guess that this is something that falls in her area of expertise. I would say the twists are this book's strong point.

I did really find this book quite interesting and I sped through in one day, but the funny thing for me although the characters are a bunch of adults, it almost teeters on feeling like a YA novel. Neema is 34, and all the candidates fighting to become the next emperor are probably also in their late 20s to 30s. Which makes sense - you wouldn't really want a 16 year old to be on the throne.

Yet, it doesn't quite read that way. If you told me Neema was 20, I would totally believe it. Although there's flashbacks to things Neema did when she was in her 20s and interactions she had with other characters in their childhood to help build this idea that she's in her 30s, it's somehow missing that maturity that I might expect out of a 34 year old. And I find it similar with the other characters as well (there's some bullying and a "will they or wont they" romance subplot which wouldn't be out of place with some angsty teens). I think the use of common YA tropes doesn't help.

Nonetheless though, otherwise a really entertaining read! It's made it on to the 2026 nomination lists for both the Hugo Award and Locus Award, so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

We live a lot of our lives based off of metrics. You want to get healthy? You might set a weight goal or count calories. However, philosophy professor and author, C. Thi Nguyen, argues that we sometimes focus too much on the metric and lose sight of our original goal. Weight loss doesn't always equal health, for example, and in the author's case led to him eating the same meals every day, as it made it easier to count the calories. This bias towards a specific number is a concept that Nguyen has coined "value capture".

On a larger scale, the world is full of metrics and ranking lists which people try and use to make informed choices - the top universities, the best wine choices. But Nguyen argues that ranking these on a pure number means you lose out on a lot of nuance. Certain universities will be better-suited for certain students, and the wine you should choose should vary depending on what food you pair it with, not the taste on its own. Not to mention universities and winemakers will then focus their efforts on trying to improve their ranking on the list which might come at the detriment of the quality of education, or produce less wine that actually tastes good with food.

The crux of this book is then comparing these metrics to the metrics you aim for in games, which on the surface seem to be the same thing - you try and collect 100 coins in a game of Mario, or you aim to score as many points as possible when you play basketball. But Nguyen tries here to explain how the metrics in games are actually different, and a good thing.

I think if there ever were a person qualified to write a book about philosophy and games, it would have to be this author. He loves board games, video games and in general seems to be quite the collector of hobbies - rock-climbing, yoga, fly-fishing and even yoyo-ing. To be honest I found this part of the book most interesting, and would prefer to learn more about Nguyen and his hobbies rather than the philosophy of value capture that he's trying to get at.

And so his first point about games is that although games have a metric you aim for, they are actually less about the actual outcome. If the goal of basketball is to put a ball in the hoop, you could just walk over to it with a ladder and directly drop it in. Games are more about the rules that the players collectively have decided must be followed for the ball going into the hoop to count. And so in games the process of playing the game itself is tied to the outcome.

He terms this as "striving play" - where you are ultimately trying to reach that goal or metric (win a game, catch a fish) but your purpose is in enjoying yourself with the process along the way. Of course there are exceptions (if you are a professional athlete or genuinely trying to catch a fish to eat it) but generally speaking if you lose a game and don't meet your goal, you don't really mind, because the whole point was the fun of it all.

And he proposes that we should use what we have learned from games to decide how we choose which metrics are important and which are not. Metrics are still useful since there's not enough time in the world to individually decide on everything - we still have to outsource some of our decision-making to other people. In the case of the author, like when buying a fridge - since who has the time to learn the intricacies of what makes a good fridge.

(To be honest the book started to lose me here. Although the subtitle on the cover says "How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game", the book doesn't actually have the answers).

The author also argues that chasing metrics and value capturing will give you power socially - in the case of science, publishing more papers is an indicator of success, and so people will game the system instead of being more thorough in their research and publishing fewer (but better) papers. And in the worst-case scenario, the metric-chasers will become socially dominant and we start to lose out on things that can't be summarised into a neat metric.

He finally introduces the concept of "autotelic activity" - activity that is valuable for its own sake (i.e. not tied to a metric or goal at the end of it). Because if you're trying to gain social status or wealth by chasing metrics, at the end of the day, what is the point of it all? And the answer should be that you value the process of chasing a metric - or, playing games.

After reading this book, I felt a bit lost. Although this book at first comes across like a pop-science book or self-help book, thanks to Nguyen's personal anecdotes and casual tone, this doesn't go as far as giving you a list of suggestions, or an actual answer to the problem like you might expect a self-help book to do. Maybe that's too much to ask, but I feel like it's just missing something to round it off. Or maybe the problem of chasing metrics isn't something that I really connect with at this stage in my life (if that doesn't make me sound like I'm too full of myself).

Nonetheless though I think it's a solid read, maybe it wasn't just quite for me. I'd love to see Nguyen come back to this in 10 years with a follow-up - maybe with time he will be able to flesh the whole thing out just a tiny bit more.

PS: As a final thing I found amusing, Nguyen is a former food critic and an avid amateur cook. And he seems to have a specific vendetta against cookbooks. Of course he concedes it is very good for someone new to cooking as it provides the exact ingredient breakdowns and step-by-step instructions. But this results in a dish that is the same every time - he recounts a tale where he had 3 separate friends make a ratatouille, and noticed they all tasted the same (because they had all used the same NYTimes recipe). Whereas Nguyen has made ratatouille 10 different ways from all the different cookbooks he owned. Actually I was rather amazed that he's made ratatouille that many times, not to mention he has enough friends that he's had 3 of them make ratatouille (or maybe that's the sort of friend group you develop from being a food critic)?

For some, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (or officially The International Military Tribunal for the Far East) is considered as a form of “victor’s justice”. History is written by the victors, and so you could argue that the Americans were free to blame Japan for the terrible things that they did in WW2, without any sort of introspection on their own actions. On the other hand, Japan’s treatment of its prisoners of war and enemy civilians during WW2 was despicable, and there needed to be some accountability for their actions.

Judgement at Tokyo provides a run-through of all the major events of the trial, as well as introducing us to its 11 judges (representing 11 of the countries that fought against Japan in the war). Of note is Chinese judge Mei Ju-ao, who was seeking justice after the events of the Nanjing Massacre, as well as Indian judge Radhabinod Pal, who was the only judge that argued for all of the defendants on trial to be acquitted of their crimes. I’ll admit I knew very little about the trials and just imagined it was a “America vs Japan” type of situation, so I appreciated the author providing a broader perspective by focusing on the non-white judges.

Overall the trial was quite messy. The biggest elephant in the room was that while the US wanted to see justice for the war crimes that Japan had committed, Emperor Hirohito was deemed off-limits. And the defendants were quite loyal to Hirohito as well - so there was quite a weird dance of them trying to say how much they respected the Emperor and how much they would listen to his opinion if he gave it, while also trying to paint the Emperor as someone that didn’t have any say in how the war progressed and so was not culpable at all.

Australia was quite pissed off by this (with the US and UK trying to tell them to shut up about it), and civilians back home in America were not happy about it either, but the US (particularly General MacArthur, who was in charge of the occupation in Japan) decided they needed the Emperor to stay in power to keep a stable, democratic Japan.

The author points out that Shigenori Togo, Minister of Foreign Affairs during WW2, suffered the most injustice out of all the defendants during the trial, as although he was part of the Prime Minister’s cabinet and in the room when a lot of decisions were made - he was against Japan starting a war with America, and pressed for Japan to surrender earlier as well.

In the end, seven Class A war criminals were sentenced to death and hanged, and sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment (but then paroled within 10 years). Others were imprisoned awaiting another trial, but eventually released. Nobusuke Kishi was one of these men - imprisoned for his involvement at Manchuria, he would go on to become prime minister, and then eventually his grandson becoming Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

Today, Japanese conservatives continue to downplay or deny war crimes like the Nanjing Massacre or the use of comfort women. And in Japan’s case its main conservative political party, the LDP, has near-continuously held power since the 50s, so this is not a minority view.

The main thought I’m left pondering after I finished this book is how could things have been done differently to prevent this outcome?

The trial made clear the war crimes Japan committed and convicted and executed the leaders at the top - arguing that they should bear ultimate responsibility for the actions of the people below them. Maybe that satisfied some people who needed to see at least someone blamed for the atrocities that happened during WW2. But they did not manage to eradicate or change the opinions of those that thought Japan waged war for justifiable reasons. And when alleged war criminals like Kishi would go on to become prime minister, and eventually his grandson Abe too, you can imagine that whatever strongly-held beliefs that Kishi had about the war would have been firmly passed down the generations as well. Not to mention with a bungled or seemingly unfair trial, it’s also given the conservatives of today plenty to be angry about with “victor’s justice”. Would it have even been possible to do the trial truly fairly?

Also I’m not sure I could imagine the US completely rooting out the conservatives of Japan, because it’s not like they would have wanted the left in power either - that’s a touch too close to communism for America, right? (Actually I learned later from Wikipedia that CIA was even covertly helping to keep the LDP in power, to prevent those pesky communists). And of course the risk of destabilising Japan when they have a nearly-communist China looming on their doorstep was probably not a good idea either.

Japanese politicians today also continue to make visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where 2 million war dead (including war criminals) are enshrined. Ostensibly they argue that they are just visiting the 2 million war dead to pay their respects. But the shrine is pretty clear on where it stands, with a memorial dedicated to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal for his dissent against the trial. While he gave some valid points on the legality and fairness of the trial, his dissent was also biased by the fact he seemed to unfairly dismiss eyewitness evidence - the author notes that Pal went on to also deny some evidence of the Holocaust.

The author mentions that in preparation for this book he had his assistants translate tons of historical documents from Chinese and Japanese into English so that he could read through them, even if he didn’t use them directly. It’s clear there was really a lot of effort put into this book. It’s a really definitive overview of the trial, and in my opinion not overly biased towards America, even if the author is American. He takes care to point out the racist attitudes still very prevalent back then in the 40s, as well as the fact that the Chinese government does have things to gain from playing up the Nanjing massacre as well.

From that perspective, it’s hard to give this any less than a 5. However if I rate this book in terms of how much I enjoyed it, it would probably lean closer to a 4. It took me a good 2 weeks to finally get around to finishing this, and it was a bit of a slog at times. So I think I’ll go in the middle and give this one a 4.5/5.

Heated Rivalry, if you haven't already heard of it, is about a pair of closeted hockey players who spend 10 years having an on-off relationship with each other. It was released as a TV series at the end of 2025 and really blew up online. It's gotten really good reviews so I was keen on watching it, but it doesn't seem to be streaming in Japan at the moment, sadly. So I decided to give the book a read instead!

I usually tend to hate-read romance novels - they're great for turning your brain off, but I don't always find the quality of them to be that high. Heated Rivalry is actually quite good though. I think this comes down to the stakes being a lot higher than your regular romance novel. One of the main characters is from Russia, a pretty anti-LGBT country, and the pair play in the NHL - which in the real world has never had a single person come out as LGBT. Which is a pretty insane statistic when you think about it. The author has mentioned that players have reached out to her privately after the release of the book, so it's not like there are actually no LGBT players - it's just the culture doesn't really make anyone feel comfortable in coming out.

In saying all that, Heated Rivalry is quite heated, so there's plenty of R18+ scenes. Maybe I'm getting old but I skimmed over them a bit - but either way I wouldn't really recommend you read this if you aren't into that sort of stuff.