#2) dee is only catholic ironically

[sometimes-love-is-enough]

Looking at your art makes me really curious about what your fics would be like if you wrote about your sides instead of thomas's. They're similar but different, you get me?

loop twenty-one.

“You’re… taking notes,” says Dee, coming to a halt on the front-of-theatre pavement. “Goodness fucking gracious. All right. You do you, I suppose.”

Min has not bothered getting up from a face-down position on the ground after her usual trip down the theatre steps. Her forehead and nose took the worst of the collision, but she barely seems to care. She’s propped herself up on her elbows, has her phone out, is typing rapidly into it. “We got hit by lightning,” she says, visibly delighted.

“I know,” says Dee with a soulless smile, tucking her hands behind her back. “I was there.”

“Actual, proper lightning,” Min reiterates. “Like, with the… electricity. The thunder. The everything. It hurt so fucking bad! I’ve never felt anything like that before, Dee!” She looks up, eyes bright and beaming ear to ear. “And I’m in near-constant physical agony, 24/7! Do you understand what great writing fuel this makes?”

“No,” says Dee. She turns her gaze towards the other side of the darkening street. Predictable as clockwork, the same time it always happens: Passion bursts out of the bookstore on the opposite street corner, followed by a barrage of angry yelling and a fully furious storeowner. She dances like a thistle caught in the wind, giggling like a maniac, gathering twenty-or-so paperbacks close to her chest and trying not to drop them all at once.

“Don’t worry! Don’t worry, they’re going to a better home!” she says, dodges a furious swipe from the end of a broom, and pirouettes elegantly before taking off across the street at a dead sprint.

As usual, she catches sight of Dee and Min on the other side of the road and brightens like she’s been filled head-to-toe with sunlight. The shopkeeper’s too close on her tail for her to stop near them, though.

“Hi, Dee! Bye, Dee!” Pash shrieks at the top of her lungs, skipping and tripping backwards down the pavement, waving as best she can with her arms full of books. “Hi and bye, person I don’t know! See you tonight, Dee! Love you, Dee!”

“Love covers a multitude of sins!” Dee calls back wisely, raising a hand in acknowledgement. “But I refuse to cover yours! Do not get arrested, and I will see you tonight!”

“It’s fine! I’ll just fuck my way out!” Passion carols with a musical little cackle, and then she starts running. In less than a minute, she’s out of sight, and the early-evening street is quiet once more.

Min is still taking detailed notes on what it feels like to be spontaneously cooked by Zeus himself. “…Seriously, what’s wrong with her?”

Dee stands sentinel beside her on the sidewalk, smiling at any pedestrians who look like they’re going to try to walk right over Min. Unsurprisingly, most people give the two of them a wide, wide berth. She says, “Lord only knows. I’ve always suspected she’s more hollow than the rest of us. Our loving creator gave her immense fuckability, but neglected to give her any semblance of brain. Praise be. Really, are you done yet? This seems unnecessary.”

“…I’m an author,” Min says after a sulky few seconds of typing. “I know it sucks that we’re dying over and over, but… if I can’t get inspiration from getting hit by lightning, what can I get inspiration from?”

“Praise be to our gracious creator, who said, lo! Let there be light! And in accordance with his spoken word, a light from the heavens arrives hence and blasts us to screaming smithereens. Call it a miracle, a blessing of the muses, because surely what else could have you taking notes on your phone in the middle of a time loop?” Dee rolls her eyes, turns her ever-present bland grin onto Min, tilts her head in vague condescension. “You do realize, of course, that none of this is going to carry over. You will lose all of those notes.”

“Ah,” says Min, suddenly downtrodden. Slowly, she puts away her phone. Slowly, she rises to her feet. Awkwardly, she brushes herself down – brings up the collar of her loose T-shirt to try to smudge the blood on her face away. “Right. Shit. Okay, well – what were you thinking we should do this time around?”

“Rat ought to be in the clockwork.” Dee shrugs, makes the vaguest of gestures right the way downwards. “We haven’t told her that we’re all dying at once, yet. Perhaps she’ll have something new to say about all of this with added context. Or maybe she’ll have a panic attack again.”

“The panic attack was your fault,” Min says, with only the barest edge of accusation. “You made her have a panic attack.”

“I deny all charges,” Dee says, and keeps on smiling.

“Sure. Okay. I don’t know if I want to go down there again. We could find Pash. Or the painter on Ursa Street, she seemed to know a thing or two. Or your angry mean ghost,” Min says, after another second of contemplation. “…Who keeps saying that she hates me, and I should know why, and she hates me even more for not knowing.”

“She says that to everyone, love, don’t take it personally,” Dee smiles, and takes Min’s hand. “Ursa Street it is. Let’s see what that lovely street artist of yours has to say about getting hit by lightning.”

[queenofcthulu]

So I just went through 52 audiobooks in 2023 so let's see what recommendations I can provide. The first few are going to be historical dramas and kind of sad and filled with trauma because I started reading the books at the top of The Most Controversial Books lists BUT their narrators were phenomenal.

This is a very long list, I hope you find something you like from it. Good luck!

1. The audiobook for Bluest Eye is read by Toni Morisson (the author) and she delivers it beautifully. I'm convinced authors who are brave enough or picky enough to narrate their own books are built different and it shows.

2. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston was a beautiful story of a woman and her journey of love in the 1800s(?) and Ruby Dee does a pheonomal job as the narrator.

3. The Color Purple by Alice Walker, another love story but with a queer twist, roughly in the same time period. She narrated it herself, and my god she does the widest range of accents for a while I was convinced that there was more than one narrator in this book. Or that was Ruby Dee? You'll have to excuse me my memory is very poor and the books were just similar enough that I get them mixed up.

So with my top three best suggestions out of the way I can offer more variety. If you have questions or looking for "similar to" books just let me know. These are listed in the order I read them, I'd recommend any of these but it depends on what the reader's style is to determine if it's a good recommendation.

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nobakov, read by Jeremy Irons (pedophilia is a very difficult subject to read about and it's representation in this is controversial already and Jeremy Irons is very good at narrating it's almost scary, so take caution definitely not for everyone)

5. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, read by Frank Muller (slice of catholic school life, coming of age, I found it fun and the narrator was very convincing when a character was talking on the phone while eating a sandwich and that tickled me)

6. The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow, read by Gabra Zack an (fantasy, story about three sisters I read cuz I thought it mirrored my family, it was a decent story but I'm not a fan of fantasy much but you might be)

7. Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, read by himself (it's about a kid and his father and the trauma of the history of Afghanistan and his childhood friend and it's very good, but very sad, so read it if you have the emotional space for it cuz it certainly drained me)

8. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, read by Dominic Hoffman (it's technically a period drama but it feels less grounded in realism than the rest, that didn't stop it from being a damn good story)

9. The Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, read by Rong Fu (if you like fantasy and you liked Pacific Rim then this is the book for you, the sequel just came out and I plan on reading it also. I'm American and while I have issues remembering names in general, I did struggle more to keep all the characters separate because the characters are based on historical Chinese figures, most notably the only female Chinese Emperor but I mixed up the names constantly so I had to go back and read it twice which I didn't mind)

10. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, read by Betty Harris (I didn't particularly like this narrator but the story was good enough to read despite it. It's 1984 but better. I haven't seen the Amazon show yet but heard it was good. This book on its own is a bit of a heavy book, but it's made worse by the parallelisms to modern political climates intentionally and expertly done by the author because she based it on true news headlines form the 1970s(?) so it was good but genuinely shook me to the core)

11. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Niel Gaiman, read by himself (it was whimsical and reminded me a bit of Wrinkle In Time in a way, would probably make a good movie, I didn't particularly enjoy it but I needed some not serious books on this list...)

12. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami, read by Feodor Chin, Ian Anthony Dale and Janet Song (Welp back to the serious stuff...if you like documentaries I would recommend this book. It's an oral history which means it's less about the facts and more about the opinions and experiences of people, it's direct interviews with victims, it taught me a lot and was done well. My only regret is not knowing Japanese because the English version only translated half the interviews and I'd have happily listened to more.)

13. Babel by R. F. Kuang, read by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown (period fantasy, language magic, I enjoyed it but wanted it to be more educational lol but that's just me, I do recommend it)

Uhhh I'm running out of energy to recall descriptions or comments for all these books so I'm just gonna go rapid fire on these and you'll have to figure them out yourself.

14. The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

15. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

16. The Book Theif by Markus Zusak

17. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

18. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

19. The Women by Kristin Hannah

20. The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

And finally, some books that do not have audiobooks (either because they were unavailable to me or the book is formatted in a way that reading it doesn't make sense, or would defeat the purpose of the formatting) but I would encourage anyone to read someday.

21. Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes

22. Piranesi by Susanna Clark

23. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote (I read this with rose colored glasses because I love Audrey Hepburn so take this with a grain of salt)

any more audiobook recommendations ppplllleeaaassseeee 😖😖🥺