hello friend!! i was wondering since you both read and write a lot if you had any recs for books that are narrated by death?
also! how is your original novel writing going? you posted a snippet to tumblr once of the opening scene i think and i still think about it because your writing was so descriptive and lush
friend!! please accept my apologies in this delayed answering, your message was so kind that every time I thought about it I got overwhelmed 🥰
Okay books narrated by death! The only one I’ve read is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and it is gorgeous, I was so obsessed with it as a kid however it is about wwii in germany so ymmv.
however! I did some research and Mort by Terry Pratchett comes highly recommended (it is part of discworld). I enjoy Pratchett, he’s very fun. Death is also a big character in the Sandman Comics by N*il G*iman. I do not enjoy G*iman but ymmv!
I also am duty bound to recommend In the Woods by Tana French, a gorgeous, atmospheric murder mystery that is deeply spooky and unsettling. Death is not the narrator…but I do believe it is a character (many many interpretations!)
I feel quite bad sending you away with like 3 recs so here’s what I’ve been reading
- Exordia by Seth Dickinson - I’m not done with this yet but so far it’s like, what if every sci fi first contact military propaganda action movie…got lost and ended up being about the moral quandary of the trolley problem, Kurdistan, pink noise, and prime numbers? what if an author who hates imperialism and loves math decided to write a book length call out of Barack Obama’s drone warfare program with body horror? what if you were a cringe fail elder millennial in nyc that rescued a sexy alien with 8 snake heads instead of only one and every time you physically touched it was a sex scene? And this made the savior of the world? this book is for: homestuck fans, people who were in tragic situationships with their wife and their bestie, pilots, people who like their sci fi hard
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin - okay if you haven’t read this stop everything and read it immediately. This book is for: tragedy lovers!!!! Gay people!!!!! Francophiles. Marxists. People who were into the social network rpf in 2013 and read that one fanfic where Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg get cast in a Giovanni’s Room adaption and finally fuck. Anyway. Earlier this year (or possibly last year?) I read a memoir about toxic masculinity and how it demands emotional alienation of the self and I was like “okay. I mean. Obviously?” And buddy. Baldwin says more about this topic in chapter one than that author did in his whole book. And it’s sooooooooooo beautiful god like every paragraph has a life ending sentence.
- the Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai - the year is 1985 and the location is Boystown, the Chicago gayborhood. Our hero? Yale, art lover, is trying to pull off an insane deal at work and survive the devastation of the AIDs epidemic. But actually the year is 2015 and our heroine is Fiona, Yale’s best friend, who travels to Paris to track down her estranged daughter and then her emotional repression stops working! I know this book sounds devastating and it REALLY is, like at one point I was sobbing so hard my husband got really worried and I was like, no, it’s all good, thumbs up! But ALSO this book is very funny and very joyful. This book is for: people who love to laugh. People who love to cry. Art lovers. People who love emotionally messy families.
- I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai - a film studies professor & podcaster returns to her elite high school boarding school 20 years after graduating and find herself getting sucked into investigating the murder of her junior year roommate, who was murdered senior year and is now the internet’s favorite cold case. Please note this book is a response to #MeToo. This book is for: people who love True Crime but are also critical of it. People who love twitter drama. People who were losers in high school. People who devotedly at watch YouTube essays. Hot divorcées. Angry women.
I have also read a lot of excellent non fiction, the Murderbot diaries (just read themmmmm! Worth it), the entire Kate Daniels series (again.), the new SJM book, and some mid to bad books.
