Top Ten Tuesday #414-Spotify Wrapped Book Tag 2022

Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all had a good week since my last one of these. I had a really good time at When We Died on Saturday night, it was a great and really interesting play and I’m so glad that The Indie and the PR team for the show gave me the opportunity to go and see it. The review is live on The Indiependent website if any of you are interested in reading it! My great month of theatre continues, I have a show booked in every week except the last week in April this month, so lots of exciting things to see. Tonight my mum and I are going to see Ain’t Too Proud which we booked as part of London Theatre Week last month, so I’m very excited for that, hopefully it will be good. I’ll admit, I’m less familiar with the music of The Temptations than my mum, but I’m sure that won’t matter too much!

Anyway, today’s Top Ten Tuesday is courtesy of Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl as always. Except I’m going completely off piste this week and instead of doing the official topic of Indie Books I’ve Read (because honestly I’ve not read too many), I’m going to do this book tag called The Spotify Wrapped Book Tag (2022) which I saw on Dedra (A Book Wanderer’s) blog a while back and looked really fun so I thought I’d save it for a day when I wasn’t feeling the topic, and that day has arrived!

The tag was originally created by Rosina @ Lace and Dagger Books. The idea is as follows, you put your 2022 playlist on shuffle (I don’t have Spotify, so I just did this by putting my iPod on shuffle) and for the first five songs (adjusted to ten like Dedra to fit TTT), you have to pick a book you read in 2022 to fit that song. They don’t need to be a perfect fit, you just have to explain why you picked that book for that song, and you can skip if you need to, as not every book will fit every song.

I’ll admit, this tag was a lot harder than I initially thought it would be as I read far less books in 2022 than I would usually, so there were less options to pick from, and my taste in music doesn’t particularly match my taste in books. Still it was a really fun and slightly different thing for me to do for TTT, so I hope you enjoy it:

1. So It Goes…-Paired With: A Marvellous Light, Freya Marske

I don’t want to share the actual song for this one since Taylor hasn’t re-recorded Reputation yet, and I won’t be sharing any of the music she doesn’t own, but I’m sure a lot of you will have heard it before anyway! I felt like this one worked quite well for Robin and Edwin, the word “magician” is in the lyrics and this song also just has a very sexy vibe, which if you’ve read A Marvellous Light, you’ll know that’s true for this book as well!

2. It’s Nice To Have A Friend-Paired With: This Poison Heart

This one was a little hard to pair, but I decided to go with This Poison Heart since a major part of the premise is Bri moving to a new town, and her new friends become a big part of the story.

3. Roar-Paired With: Fix The System, Not The Women

A non-fiction book might seem like an odd choice but I feel like this song and this book have very similar vibes, Roar is all about standing up for yourself and self-empowerment and reading Fix The System, Not The Women definitely had me feeling angry about the various ways the patriarchy works against women and wanting to tear the whole system down, so I feel like the vibes work!

4. Come Alive-Paired With: The Diamond Eye

Okay, this might seem like kind of an ironic song choice given that The Diamond Eye is about war, but hear me out! A lot of Mila’s journey in this book is about coming into herself, finding her place in the world and gathering the courage to stand up to her abusive ex-husband, and this song definitely works for those themes.

5. Thinking of You-Paired With: The Librarian Spy

This was a difficult one to pair, but I eventually landed on The Librarian Spy because although Elaine does not end up in a relationship with Josef’s friend Etienne (thankfully!), I felt like this worked quite well for where she is for the most of the book: she has to work with Etienne as part of the Resistance, but working with her husband’s best friend does remind her a lot her missing husband and so it works for the basic premise of the song, even if the exact situation isn’t the same as the one Katy Perry describes in Thinking Of You.

6. Story of Tonight-Paired With: Resistance Women

Different war sure, and several hundred years separating the history, but I think this song works just as well for the Red Orchestra in this book as it does for the Revolutionary War soldiers in Hamilton. After all, they were fighting to free their country from the Nazis and for the hope of a better future, despite knowing it was likely many of them would die without getting to see it.

7. Getaway Car-Paired With: Portrait of A Thief

Again no clip for this one as it doesn’t yet have a Taylor’s version. I almost squealed when this song came up on my shuffle because I knew instantly which book to pair it with: Portrait of A Thief is a heist novel, and one of the main characters, Lily is a getaway driver and there are a lot of car chases in this book, so on a purely surface level, Getaway Car is the perfect match for this book!

8. invisible string-Paired With: Looking For Jane

It’s so hard to explain why this song and this book are the perfect fit without going in to spoilery territory, so let’s just say: all three main characters of this novel are bound together in some way and this song is all about feeling connected to someone before you’ve even met them which works so perfectly for this book.

9. Gonna Get Even-Paired With: The Mad Girls of New York

Much of Nellie’s impetus for doing the Madhouse article in the first place is to get even, to prove to the male editors who have kept turning her down that female journalists can do something, and not only that, that there are some stories only female journalists can get. She also has a rivalry with a fellow reporter, Sam Colton for much of the book as well, so the song also works on that level.

10. Coming Home-Paired With: Life After Life

I found this song very fitting for Ursula Todd, the main character of Life After Life because no matter where she goes in her many lives, she always ends up coming back to her home, Fox Corner and her family.

So there we go, a slightly different tag and TTT for you all today, but I hope you found it as fun as I did! If nothing else, it’s given you a big of an insight into my taste in music (although the fact I listen to a lot of Taylor Swift probably wasn’t a surprise to all that many of you!). Have you read any of these books? Do you agree with my book/song pairings? Let me know in the comments!

If you want to give this tag a go, I definitely recommend it, it was really fun, if a little tricky! I’ll be back next week with another Top Ten Tuesday, this time it’s Titles With Animals In Them/Covers With Animals On Them. I’ve done Covers With Nature On Them but not specifically animals, and it’s been a while since we last did a covers topic, so I think I’m going to go down the cover route and do Covers With Animals On Them.