Kim Jae Min Reading Journal Blog

 Revelation, By Flannery O'Connor (1964) 8.5/10 Despite being the main character, Mrs. Turpin is a disgusting person with twisted thoughts. She makes up strange castes inside the mind, and considers most others she meets to be below her. As a moderner’s view, she is both racist and mammonistic. The worse thing is, she uses these wrong ideals to feel good about herself while belittling others. Everyone in the waiting room is severely mean toward certain others in the room. This may be because of the whole twisted notions about supremacy that was natural in the era. The rich hated the poor, the white hated the black, and so on. This story points out countless contradictions and wrong ideas that are portrayed with characters with terrible personalities. This story also holds countless details related to Christianity. To start, the title itself is from the Book of Revelation by John the apostle. Mary Grace functions as a messenger sent by God to deliver the ever-important message to Mr...

 The Tower, By  Marghanita Laski  (1995) 8/10 I was surprised about how much this story was similar to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. They both share feministic messages depicted by an oppressing male husband figure and a female main character trying to break free from him. Also, the slow progressive call of madness was an important factor in both stories. On the other hand, the two stories differ in the most important way. In The Yellow Wallpaper’, the main character did go mad, but still managed to break free from her husband and triumph over him. However, in ‘The Tower’, the main character is swallowed not only by the madness, but also with fear. Thus, instead of teaching her husband a lesson, she descends, trembling and stuttering into the abyss. I found the detail that the ‘tower’, which is supposed to take someone higher, ended up taking the main character down then where she started from to be very ironic. Overall, I think this story would have been a bit better wit...

 The Yellow Wallpaper, By Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) 9/10 I know the author didn’t really intend to anything with this topic, but I couldn’t help but feel that this story was very similar to cosmic horror stories. The slow, slicky descend into madness and the shocking ending totally fit my taste. During my second read, I came up with an interpretative thought that the ‘ripping away the wallpaper’ and ‘letting the woman out’ is a possible metaphor for giving birth. It seems the main character is mentally obsessed with the concept of birth after actually giving birth to a child. This obsession, combined with the stress originating from her husband’s oppression, might have been expressed in the form of seeing a woman, symbolizing both the newborn baby and herself, who must be freed. I also focused on the husband character. He doesn’t show any intense form of emotion during the story except the ending, and treats the main character almost like a child. His actions are based on...

Caring For Plants, By Hye-young Pyun (2017) 7/10 I found it interesting that not a single person in this whole story is likable. Oghi, pitiful and dismantled as he is, is a somewhat degenerate guy with pretty unlikable thoughts. The mother-in-law seems to be quite self-righteous with secret plans about everything. The caregiver possibly stole and drank during working, and secretly considered Oghi to be a cripple all along. The pastor seemed to be doing his job for the money. The only people we don’t really judge in this story are the therapist, who seems to be a decent guy, and Oghi’s wife, who is already dead. I guess this is normal, a bit even like real life. Everyone has flaws that they tend to hide from others to pass as a good person. Getting to close to that person, and getting to know all these flaws, may make us quickly hate that person. Does the mother-in-law actually plan to kill Oghi? I personally think she is pondering about it herself. She seemed to have mixed ideas ab...

 A Manual For Cleaning Women, By Lucia Berlin (2015) 8/10 I found the way this story was written to have more weak points then good points. I understood what kind of atmosphere the author wanted to deliver, but I don’t think this way of slicing up the story’s progress was that necessary. Personally, I think it basically made reading the story slow and hard to focus. I felt that this story delivered the feelings of the main character very raw. We are roughly introduced into the life of this weary, suffering cleaning lady. Her stories are realistic in both good and bad ways. Her thoughts and actions, choices are mentioned bluntly for the reader to judge, with only her descriptions to add to the details. Thus, although I found her to be likable and pitiful, I also wanted to keep my distance from her life. I guess since this story is originally from a collection of stories with the same characters, I would have better sympathized with the main character if I read the other stories....