Self-Ashtualisation

Dear friend of friend of friend of acquaintance, I am sending you this pseudo-letter via Messenger, which I’ll delete A minute before your 5.55pm post-post-post inspirational post About, according to your promise in your last live broadcast, The danger of self-stealing, of all things, Before you could turn me into a block of butter with that block button, To inform you without my own consent that last night, vegetated as I was in my dream, Every (other) part of you, a mere stranger, turned into my strictest secondary school teacher, My formerly-bi-but-now-formally-bye-tongued teacher, Head to toe, semi-tongueless, Except your surprisingly accepting, alarmingly righteous left hand.   They signed solemnly, your left hand and the strictest teacher’s right, Apparently having a serious walk-and-talk on how to eat what’s left Of my scared, stealthy behaviour alive, How to turn my chewed mischief into some golden chicken-winked Wingless nuggets of wisdom Af

   Busy and knackered? In dire need of some good books to unwind, but not enough time to read and even less to search for those books? Or have you been meaning to take up reading (again) but find yourself bookrastinating? I think I can help you!    In today’s post I’ll be sharing eleven of the best novellas I’ve read. If fiction is not your cup of tea, no worries, because over the coming weeks I’ll be recommending the best non-fiction books and poetry collections under 200 pages. If you need short story collections to dive in and out, I’ve got you covered in one of my upcoming posts too! For now, let’s jump into that great rabbit hole of fantastic fiction with me 🐰 Without further ado, here are eleven electric novellas under 200 pages that will lift you out of the electrocuting chair of bookrastination (in case you’re wondering, no, I can’t help being absolutely smitten with repeating numbers – and to add unapologetically, eleven happens to be my favourite number #SorryNotSorry):

   When Sash was twelve, they were told that they would be struck by thunder if they referred and asked others to refer to themself by anything other than he, him or his. Disbelievingly, they hissed, of course. They were far from superstitious, unlike all the adults here in Parentitilla, the most conservative of all the adult-centred countries in the world. And they were right, of course they were – no thunder struck them, at least not in a natural-consequential way, but they were thunderstruck by the collective cruelty of the punishing people around them, through the mobile apps those people used to strike their body into submission. The adults’ laughter was the opposite of drowned out when their body nearly sank, in a metaphorical sense, dragged down by the weight of the artificially-induced rainwater. All the while their head was nearly cracked by the thunderous cracks – those blasts were extremely loud-mouthed, the sounds the cracks produced, but even those could not drown out t