Top Ten Tuesday #449

Hi all! Hope you’ve all had a good week since I last did one of these, mine has been fairly quiet but I did go to the British Designer Sale with my mum on Wednesday which was very nice, I got a lovely new pair of trousers and they had some really lovely Christmas lights up around Chelsea so it was nice to walk around and have a look at those-Chelsea also has our nearest Knoops and it is the best hot chocolate bar none, so always very happy to have an excuse to go there!

Anyway, it’s Tuesday and so time for another Top Ten Tuesday, courtesy of Jana from That Artsy Reader Girl. This week is a Freebie Week, and I decided I want to bring back a topic we’d done a few years back because I had so much fun with it, Songs That Would Make Great Books (the original topic was Book Titles That Would Make Great Songs, but I switched it), and specifically today, I’m going to talk about Taylor Swift Songs That Would Make Great Books, because her songs are so narratively driven anyway, I thought it would be really fun to come up with ideas for what these songs might be like as books. Limiting myself to ten will be difficult but I am going to try!

1. champagne problems

I mean pretty much every song on folklore and evermore is a “narrative” song, since those two albums were generally all built around fictional stories, but this is one would just make an absolutely perfect book. In my head, I would start this one with the rejected proposal and then would do a reverse chronological timeline, alternating between the guy and the girl’s perspective, so you could see what lead up to the rejected proposal and how their views on the relationship differed.

2. All Too Well

Yes, I know this is a super obvious choice, but it is such a perfect narrative within a song, I couldn’t not include it. I love the idea of this one starting with the guy in his house, picking up the scarf from the drawer and then the story unwinding in flashbacks of their relationship from there, obviously culminating in the breakup and its aftermath.

3. Timeless

Okay so this one would be a collection of short stories featuring the people mentioned in the photographs of the song, it would start with a woman in the present day finding the box of photos in the antique shop as a framing device and then the rest of the book would be these short stories of the lives of the people in the photographs (obviously with some additions, since she only mentions a couple of the photos in the song) and then it would all culminate with the woman and her husband sitting on their porch looking through their own box of photos.

4. no body, no crime

I mean it’s all there in the song: this is a revenge thriller where a group of women team up to kill the cheating husband of their best friend after he murders her, and pin his murder on his mistress. It would be very much a “support women’s wrongs” kind of a book and I would be very here for it.

5. The Lucky One

I love the idea of a dual timeline for this one: we have the older star who runs away from it all, and then the young up and comer who is just stepping into the spotlight, and I feel like it would take place over different times, so you’d have the older woman’s story starting in the sixties and showing her rise to fame and her eventual decision to run away from it all and then in the present day you’d see the young woman’s journey into fame and as she increasingly starts to struggle with her fame, she becomes more and more obsessed with this older woman’s story and determined to track her down and that’s where their stories would overlap.

6. Clean

I actually did start writing a short story based on this one a while back and never finished it, but the general idea was that it would be about a woman who had fled from an abusive relationship, I think it started with her in the attic of her home, sorting through mementos from their relationship and then the rest of the story was going to be flashbacks of what happened and what led her to the point of leaving the relationship. I don’t know why I never finished it!

7. Everything Has Changed

I actually wrote a Glee fanfic for this one about ten years or so ago, when I was doing a series of Finchel one-shots based around Taylor Swift songs. I based the idea kind of around the music video for the song, so I’ll do the same here: this would essentially be a childhood friends to lovers romance, you’d see them growing up together, becoming friends and then that eventually blossoming into romance as they got older.

8. Last Kiss

One of my favourite and I’m going to say decidedly underrated Taylor Swift songs, but that’s neither here nor there. I know this one is about a breakup but in my head it’s always been about death, I don’t know what that says about me and my morbid thoughts but that’s neither here nor there for this conversation. So for me, this story would be about a woman whose partner dies and we’d start the book at the funeral, and then go simultaneously backwards and forwards in time from there, each chapter would alternate between the past and the present, so in the past you get to see their relationship before he died and then the present is her journey through her grief.

9. Dear John

Again this is one that kind of writes itself because the narrative is so clear: I’d imagine this being like a teacher/student scenario, but not high school student because that gives me all kinds of ick, so I think I’d have this as like a college student getting involved with her older professor and she gets more and more drawn into this relationship, despite all her friends and everyone around her being extremely concerned and we would see the whole thing slowly unravel over time as she comes to realise his true colours.

10. ’tis the damn season

This would be a holiday romance, two former childhood sweethearts who broke up when they went off to university have both returned to their shared hometown for Christmas after not having seen each other for years and struggle with their lingering feelings for one another, and the awkwardness of once having known each other so well and now not really knowing who the other person is as an adult. Naturally shenanigans would ensue, and their feelings would come to a head…..just as Christmas approaches.

So there we go, I actually managed to keep this to ten, I’m quite surprised! As you can probably tell from this, 90% of my favourite Taylor Swift songs are the sad ones, I think only two of these stories were actually happy ideas, but what can I say? Apparently I don’t do happy well, I do heartbreak, death and murder! Would you read any of these books? If you’re a Taylor fan, where do you lie on the happy/sad song spectrum? Would you be interested in me doing another one of these songs as stories kinds of posts in the future (doesn’t necessarily have to be Taylor Swift songs!)? Let me know in the comments!

I’ll be back with another Top Ten Tuesday next week, it’s the annual Winter TBR list, another “list of shame” for me where I will realise how few of my Autumn TBR books I’ve read and then promptly make another list of books that I likely still will not have read by the time March comes around. Do I enjoy making our seasonal TBR lists? Absolutely. Am I successful at completing said lists? Absolutely not.