February is over, and so it is once again time to go over everything that I have read or watched this time around. Don’t ask why I haven’t posted individual pieces for these even though I definitely read and watched some pretty amazing things this month. I was lazy. Sue me.
Or maybe I was really stressed about college decisions coming out towards the beginning of April here in China. I honestly can’t tell if I’m stressed or not; maybe my laziness was actually reflective of my stress. The magnificence of the human brain.
Anyway, now, it’s time for me to stop writing about my weird psyche and go onto the actual things that this website is about. Books! Movies! Theater! (Yes, the theaters near my home in China have finally re-opened, and I am ecstatic.) TV shows!
First, let’s do books. I’ve set a basically impossible goal for myself, which is to read all of the roughly 300 books in my bookshelf that I haven’t read (I have a very big bookshelf and a lot of books). February saw me finish 7. A little less than my goal fo 28, but I’m letting myself off the hook. I do that often, have you noticed? Also, I’ve decided to start adding author names to my book names. I should’ve done that before, but it’s never too late to start. If you ask me.
1. February 4th, Girls Made of Glass and Snow by Melissa Bashardoust
Starting off with a bang, I finally finished this book. I think I read it back in 2018, loved it, decided to put it on my ‘List of Books I Want to Own’ list, and now, in 2023, I finally own a copy. I will not lie, I was very naive back then, so you can imagine the great and pleasant surprise it was for me to find out that the main character of this story, Lynet, is in a lesbian relationship. My wlw path started before I even realized. I’m very proud of this, I hope you note.
Girls Made of Glass and Snow is a retelling of the Snow White story with a few twists and turns. The narrative alters from Mina’s (the once-evil stepmother) perspective and Lynet’s (Snow White herself). I will be honest, I still love this book. It didn’t hit me as hard as it did in 2018 (I think I might have silently sobbed at the final scene in 2018 when I read it in the bookshop near my house), but it was still a tug at the heart strings. I loved the way that Mina’s story revolves around her having a terrible influence on her and how that impacts the way she sees love for others and for herself, and yet her entire story is about love. She’s the only one who doesn’t realize it, and I think that’s poetic.
I will say that I thought certain scenes could have been a lot more impactful if they had been a little more drawn out. I mean, the only scene that comes immediately to mind when I think of this book is the ending, where Mina’s blood is coating her lips and she croaks out something that I won’t spoil. Everything else, even though Lynet goes through some pretty traumatic stuff, didn’t stick. And her love story with the female nurse (see, I can’t even remember her name; she wasn’t very significant) was very rushed? So this book definitely isn’t perfect.
Do I think it’s still a good read? Yes. Will I be reading it again? Didn’t you hear how I have 300 books left to read?
2. February 12th, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical story by feminist Jeanette Winterson. It’s also gay, which is why I picked it up initially (besides the pretty cool title). It’s the story about a young girl who is adopted into a highly religious family and her struggles with her religion and family when she realizes she’s gay.
I won’t lie, I really wanted to like this novel. I mean, it’s by a really cool person, tells a gay coming of age story, and is about fruits. Who wouldn’t love that? But I found it difficult to read. I think the writing was beautiful at times and confusing at others, a bit dragged out at times and too rapid at others. I know this is a controversial opinion, but I didn’t like this as much as I had hoped I would.
Maybe I just didn’t get it.
Just kidding, I think I got it, and I won’t lie, this feels like that class of literature that is Literature with a capital L. The kind that is wordy, difficult to understand on purpose, and meant for analysis and not really pleasure reading. So I can’t life, I didn’t love this, and I won’t be reading it again. I don’t regret having read it (I never regret reading anything so this statement doesn’t mean much, actually), but I won’t recommend this to people who have to be forced to read so-called classical literature (like me).
3. February 18th, Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin
I went to a bookstore here in China with my friends, almost certain I wouldn’t find anything I like (I prefer reading in English most of the times), and innocently lying on a pile of sex-ed books was this, this lesbian novel that isn’t really lesbian at all.
I read what the book was about, was immediately intrigued, and bought it despite preferring to read in English. I devoured it in the next few hours, and I think I liked it. I think I did.
The story is about a woman who’s daughter has come out as a lesbian and is struggling to accept it. She’s a nurse at an elderly home, so she’s also struggling with one of her patients being mistreated by the facility and what death means. I have to say, this take on the lesbian story was refreshing. Here you have a woman, who is by no means a terrible person, simply a normal and perhaps boring one, who is trying so hard to understand and accept her daughter for who she loves and yet is struggling so hard that she literally denies everything, even when her daughter and her lover start living at her home. She is the epitome of the Watchers of Lu Xun’s stories (he’s a famous Chinese writer and I highly recommend his works if you want to get into Chinese literature): she watches from the sidelines, thinks herself apart from the conflicts, and doesn’t realize that her world is burning with the social issues she thinks are far from her.
She’s not just struggling to accept her daughter, though. She’s also struggling to understand why her patient, who is so influential and famous that when she first came to the elderly home facility people actually came to interview her, is being treated like she’s nothing now that she’s too old to do anything about it. She’s trying to reconcile the ideas of ‘creating something in this life’ that we all have with the idea that no matter who you were once, we are all the same in death’s eyes.
Kim Hye-jin creates these incredibly alive characters and asks the readers to participate in the questions she asks. She asks question after question, and she is there with us to explore it, but she gives no answers. I would sincerely, highly, recommend this book to everyone. Especially if you’re trying to come out or trying to understand a child who’s coming out. The story itself is a beautiful question.
4. February 19th, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Remember when I said that I read somethings that I think are my all-time favorite this month? This is it. This is the book that I think I’ll read a million times in the next decades of my life, this is a book that I think will be a long time before I get bored of it.
The Buried Giant tells the story of an elderly couple Axl and Beatrice as they struggle against a mist that causes amnesia in post-Arthurian England to find their son, and later, their memories. I was shocked when I learned that this book didn’t receive any award for Ishiguro, because I read Never Let Me Go, thought nothing of it, and then read this book and realized, ‘Holy Crap, this man is a genius.’ I fell in love with the story, the way that the story unfurls in a way that feels like a dream, the way that we follow along the characters as they go through obstacle after obstacle, the way that the ending is open and leaves room for a million thoughts.
I am also going to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever read a story with a more beautiful relationship that Axl and Beatrice. Axl’s ‘princess’ is the center of his world, and after reading and watching so much about the dearth of marital life, I loved this. I really did.
Just go read it, okay. Don’t make me beg you.
5. February 20th, The Secret Life of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
There are nine short stories, and some of them are gay and some of them aren’t, but they’re all about women who want to have sex (shocker), and women who are religious. I will be honest with you and say that I loved this book. Loved this book. I mean it. I finished it in like an hour (which is an exaggeration meant to show you how much I couldn’t put this book down), and loved every second of it.
The writing in this book was stunningly beautiful. There’s this once story about a woman who has sex every year with her best friend, who is also a woman. The best friend thinks what they do doesn’t count as sex and the woman is in love with her. So when they have sex, the best friend prays to God, asking Him to forgive her, and the woman prays to her, because she is her religion. The final line of that story? ‘She is my religion’, or something like that? My dark, dead heart might have lived a little.
Final decision made by my court: go read it. May God be with you.
6. February 22nd, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
This book is why I had to take a break for the rest of February. This book, and the fact that the next book I started was too difficult to read through (because every time something happened I would want to cry. I know, shocker to believe, considering I donated my tear ducts years ago, but there you have it.). This book was just so long and archaic. It’s the story of a young man who is framed for something he didn’t do when he was young, and then he returns with a bunch of money and gets revenge on all the people who wronged him.
Honestly, the beginning was tough to get through. That’s the case for me with a lot of these so-called classical literature books. I find the set up boring. But then the story gets going and I start to enjoy the plot, even though sometimes I still find myself skipping over lines because the descriptions just go on forever. I will say that this book, once you get past the beginning where the ominous atmosphere is so thick you can basically touch it, is really interesting. I was highly invested.
Then I finished the book, and realized, ‘hey, there are no women in this story.’ And then I realized, ‘oh no, wait, there are women in this story, they’re just love interests who are waiting for people to rescue them or to fall in love with them and have no personality beyond that one, perfect trait.’ Maybe that’s why I didn’t like this book. And the final love interest they pair with the Count? I’m sorry, I didn’t know this book was in league with Wes Anderson. I didn’t realize marrying your adoptive daughter was so popular.
I enjoyed this book. But as a feminist, I would have to say, go read something else that’s six hundred pages and actually has character. Something like, I don’t know, The Second Sex.
7. February 22nd, The Histories by Eavan Boland
Skimmed through this as a respite from The Count of Monte Cristo. It was fine. I’m not a huge poetry person, so I didn’t really get most of its magnificence I suppose, but I’ll read it again one day when I’m older and hopefully I’ll get it then. Also, the author is a feminist. Clearly I have a type.
In summation, February was mostly me reading gay books with a lot of women and religion. The women part is normal. The religion, not so much. So clearly, I'm branching out. This is turning a lot longer than I had thought, but I didn't watch any TV shows this month so I'll save the films for the next part. See you in part 2!
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