Your personal Tumblr library awaits
hi, dear author! i hope you're doing well. i just wanted to say that i love your satoshoko and reading your stories always feels like time well-spent. you're an excellent writer which ig would only stand to reason you're probably a reader as well haha. anyway, ive been itching for more of them so I was wondering if you could pretty please w a cherry on top give me book recs in the vein of (your) satoshoko? doesn't even have to hit the same tropes as stsk, just their general vibe, and/or your writing style for their stories. thank you in advance if you answer ♡
Hi! Thank you for your kind comments about my writing. I have a weird relationship with my own stories, so it’s nice to hear that they are a) being read and b) liked by readers. I do read a lot, guilty as charged. I don’t, however, read a ton of romance, so a lot of my suggestions are more along the vibes of dealing with alienation that I think haunts the SatoShoko ship.
So anyways, the books I have selected are about loneliness, and the strange humor that is found within sadness. I hope you haven’t read at least some of them, nor see them on the list and think less of me. I am obviously not even a shadow of these writers, so I suspect that you will find them way more entertaining to read. As always, some of these stories could have triggering content so if there is anything you are hoping to avoid, look them up on Goodreads or Storygraph first.
Normal People by Sally Rooney is a literary romance for sad people, and the man isn’t completely toxic, so it has to go at the top of the list.
“The depressed person” is a short story from David Foster Wallace that is in his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It’s my favorite of his books and is full of great stories but is also the one that repulses me the most. The short story itself is about a woman coping with depression, and was the vibe I was going for in the story “Displacement.”
The reason it took me some time to answer this message is because I had to reread at least two of the stories in Eleven Kind of Loneliness by Richard Yates. Each story is in plain prose, and focuses on the different ways that people deceive themselves. I had to reread it just to re-check the vibes, but it’s great and I really enjoyed it. Hopefully the rest of it checks out! I guess I'll find out as I continue my reread lol.
My last recommendation is a book I just finished. Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata is a collection of stories that are a little surreal, pretty strange, and are all about connection in some way or another. I feel like SatoShoko probably watch and read weird shit all the time, so that’s my pretence for including it, but I actually just think that it’s a really great collection of short stories.
Now, if you’re looking for SatoShoko stories, I know that there are several collections and bookmarks featuring different writers. My writer pal bby_rabbit wrote me a good SatoShoko, “heartbreak soldiers, disappointment junkies” (NSFW, M). It’s a great story, and to be frank, there would be no antioedipus without bby_rabbit (or Bawgdan, as she was going by when we met).
Happy reading, and let me know if you need anything else!