Happy Friday, everyone!
Today, I’m here with a tag I got so excited about that putting it off longer was simply impossible!
If you know me at all, you’ll know that about 80% of my free time is poured into anything book- or music-related.
(The remaining 20% are reserved for family, friends, pets, food, and Netflix – the last of which, by the way, has finally managed to dub the new Bridgerton season into Russian, meaning that I had the perfect excuse to start binge-watching again 🙃)
So, of course, a tag that combined both books and music was exactly up my alley! Especially since I’ve already been facing severe music deprivation since my latest move, which has forced me to simultaneously give up orchestra, choir, and violin and piano lessons 😭 Of course, I could try and find replacements, but the fact that I am currently very busy, find meeting a ton of new people at once kind of overwhelming, and will be moving again in August anyway has made me extremely lazy in that regard…
Which means The Chapters & Melodies Tag will have to do instead! A huge thank you goes to Line @ First Line Reader for tagging me, and also to Diamond @ I have 12% of a plan and Evin @ A Curly Sue’s Ramblings for coming up with this in the first place!
- Link back to the creators’ posts – I have 12% of a plan & A Curly Sue’s Ramblings
- Thank the person who tagged you
- Answer the prompts and use the original graphics
- Tag 5 bloggers who would enjoy doing this tag
- Notify them by commenting on their blog
- Use the tag “Chapters & Melodies Tag” in your post
- Have fun!
Call me the reaper, gonna stalk you through the night
Or Freddy Krueger gonna show up in your night-
-mares
I'mma torture you as you look in my eyes
And then I'mma end you with the sharpness of my scythe
This might be the time to admit that I have very disturbing taste, both in music and in books 😅 Because apparently, a guaranteed way for any kind of art form to make it into my favorites is for it to prominently feature characters gruesomely finishing each other off…
But I can’t help it! Not when both Scythe the song and Scythe the book are so amazingly good! The former because it is deliciously creepy, and the latter because it is one of the most thought-provoking dystopian novels I’ve ever read. I mean, how can a book fail to grab your attention when it features a society in which some people have been tasked with killing others to stop a world that has conquered death from becoming overpopulated?
“As a young man, I marveled at the stupidity and hypocrisy of the mortal age. In those days, the purposeful act of ending human life was considered the most heinous of crimes. How ridiculous! I know how hard it is to imagine that what is now humanity’s highest calling was once considered a crime. How small-minded and hypocritical mortal man was, for even as they despised the enders of life, they loved nature – which, in those days, took every human life ever conceived. Nature deemed that to be born was an automatic sentence to death, and then brought about that death with vicious consistency.
We changed that.
We are now a force greater than nature.“
Scythe Goddard in Scythe by Neal Shusterman, p. 202
Uh uh uh - uh ah
Uh uh uh ah
Uh uh uh - uh ah
Uh uh uh ah
An Austrian group known for songs that are either entirely ridiculous, extremely socially critical, or both, EAV is one of my favorite bands ever! 🤩 So of course I had to sneak them into this post somehow!
However, the reason their song Neandertal reminds me of a book is actually very stupid… The song itself is about the fact that humanity hasn’t evolved much since the Stone Age and is still made up of selfish, hypocritical, war-mongering bigots. But it also features a bunch of paleolithic Neanderthal grunting – just like a certain German YA book that blew me away with what was totally one of the most realistic plots I’ve ever come across! 🙄
In Lapislazuli – Im Auge des Bären (miraculously, this masterpiece of a novel has never been translated into English, but the title means Lapis Lazuli – In the Eye of the Bear), a passing meteor thaws a young Neanderthal boy who was frozen into the ice of a glacier. Thousands of years after he was meant to have died, Bataa is brought back to life and into the 21st-century world of angsty teenager Sophie, who is still struggling to come to terms with her parents’ recent divorce. Due to her ingenious linguistic talent, Sophie has soon decoded Bataa’s language of grunts and clicks, making for some truly unique dialogue:
“DWA-HŒSCH.”
“Wahösch”, wiederholte Sophie. “Auge.”
“DWA-HŒSCH… UODSCHAA.”
“Auge… Bär”
“DWA-HŒSCH UODSCHAAMAH klock!-TAOO AKK MAA-OH BATAA!”
Bataa and Sophie in Lapislazuli – Im Auge des Bären by Volker Krappen, p. 94
A little hint: The German verb ‘wiederholen’ means to repeat. If your language skills are even close to Sophie’s, you should now have all the vocabulary needed to decipher the above passage. My advice, though, would be to skip this book altogether and get your daily dose of Neanderthal grunting from EAV instead…
Where She Went by Gayle Forman! Even though Gayle Forman’s If I Stay is vastly more popular, its companion novel Where She Went is my favorite of the two by a long shot. Featuring a depressed main character and a super angsty romance between a rock star and a classical cellist – thus uniting my love for both types of music 🥰 – this book was basically guaranteed a spot in my heart from the get-go. I would highly recommend it, and If I Stay as well!
You crossed the water, left me ashore
It killed me enough, but you wanted more
You blew up the bridge, a mad terrorist
Waved from your side, threw me a kiss
I started to follow but realized too late
There was nothing but air underneath my feet
“Bridge”, Collateral Damage, Track 4 from Where She Went by Gayle Forman, p. 176
'Cause we were just kids when we fell in love
Not knowing what it was
I will not give you up this time
But darling, just kiss me slow, your heart is all I own
And in your eyes, you're holding mine
Is Ed Sheeran’s Perfect the most basic childhood-friends-to-lovers song ever? Maybe… But that doesn’t stop me from loving it with all my heart!! 🥰 The melody! The wholesomeness! And the fact that it’s a Viennese waltz, which just so happens to be my favorite dance!
(At least as long as I’m not dancing it with my dad, who takes the “you have to waltz around the entire ballroom” bit very seriously and has no qualms about shoving more ignorant people out of the way to achieve this goal. Which means those people then glare very angrily at you while you do an abysmal job at trying to avoid their gazes and not stumble into them even more due to extreme spinning-induced dizziness… 😅)
However, Perfect is also just the perfect song for what is probably my favorite fictional couple of all time – Anne Shirely and Gilbert Blythe from L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series! They’ve got it all: A hate-to-friendship-to-love romance with a ton of angst and pain thrown in before we get to the love part. Lots of yearning and heartbreak. Knowledge that their partner will support them through thick and thin in what is one of the most wholesome and healthiest relationships ever depicted in fiction!
(And also, the mere fact that this relationship has Gilbert Blythe in it should be more than enough for anyone. Any unrealistically high romantic expectations I have are probably entirely Gilbert’s fault! 😇)
“Nothing mattered to me for a time there, after you told me you could never love me, Anne. There was nobody else – there never could be anybody else for me but you. I’ve loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school.“
Gilbert Blythe in Anne of the Island, p. 242
Are you, are you coming to the tree
Where I told you to run so we'd both be free?
Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be
If we met at midnight in the hanging tree
How could I possibly choose anything other than The Hanging Tree for this one? The Hunger Games has a very secure spot among my top five series of all time, and – which is quite unusual where my favorites are concerned – I also love its adaptation!
And the music!!!! 😍 It’s so good! Particularly The Hanging Tree, which turned out even better than I ever could have imagined. That haunting minor melody? That part where the choir comes in? This song never fails to give me goosebumps, and I absolutely adore it!!
A hush in the trees. Just the rustle of leaves in the breeze. But no birds, mockingjay or other. Peeta’s right. They do fall silent when I sing. Just like they did for my father.
“Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.”
Katniss Everdeen in Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, p. 145-146
- Amanda @ Literary Weaponry
- Ash @ Ink Words and Ash
- Janette @ Wicked Witch’s Blog
- Lay @ bookshelfsoliloquies
- Rachel @ A Bookworm’s Paradise
As always, don’t feel under any obligation to do this unless you want to, but I feel like you guys could recommend some pretty awesome music and books to me, so I’m tagging you!
Which already brings us to the end of this tag! I hope you had fun reading, maybe discovered some new tunes along the way, and aren’t judging my chaotic music tastes too much 😁 Feel free to tell me all your thoughts on my pairings down below, and if you have any awesome novel-song combinations of your own that you’d like to recommend, please don’t hesitate to give them to me!!!
A Book Owl's Corner 
There are so many good songs in this post!!! 😍 I also don’t know whether to be proud or sorry that I tagged you for something that jumped your cue of tags 😄🙈
I liked the Scythe one, although I might have to ignore the lyrics if I ever listen to that again 😅 A little too macabre for me but the melody was good.
And you obviously shared the most important lyrics of the Neandertal song 😂😂 So deep! The book of course also sounds like it revolutionized the German literary scene. Really sorry I can’t read it.
I appreciate the Ed Sheeran and that song is definitely fitting for that scenario although I haven’t read the books.
And The Hanging Tree was just a nice surprise!! I haven’t heard it in a while but I have such distinct memories of watching the movie for the first time and that song started playing. Who knew Jennifer Lawrence could sing like that? And the way it builds into that choir section is just chilling!
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You should definitely be proud 😁😂 I had so much fun with this, so thanks again for tagging me!! 🥰
And lololol, I actually love macabre songs every once in a while and have quite a few of them in my playlists 😅 So many of them have interesting melodies! 😁 Although I have also freaked myself out before because I listened to them while I was driving home alone late at night… So I guess I partially see where you’re coming from! I’m usually fine if I have a few other songs thrown in, though! 😄
I’m glad you appreciated the depth of those Neandertal lyrics, however 😇 Of course I had to pick those because a) they were relevant to why the song reminds me of that absolutely wonderful book and b) I felt like you would probably get the gist of them without me having to translate anything, meaning I could get away with more laziness 😊
Also, the Anne of Green Gables books are absolutely wonderful and probably my favorite classics of all time!! 🥰 But then again, they do follow Anne growing up, so I’m not sure if you’d be a fan, seeing you have a strange aversion to child protagonists 😜 But I’m glad we agree that The Hanging Tree is awesome!! I also vividly remember the first time I saw the movie – the choir entrance and the way they interspersed that song with scenes from the rebellion gave me chills as well, and it was so much better than everything I could have hoped for! 🤩😭🥰
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I can’t imagine listening to that song while driving alone in the dark 😱
I should have known that laziness was behind those lyrics 😂 Then I was just left trying to figuring out what else they were singing, which was very difficult because of the speed. I caught them saying “Europe is big” and got all excited because I understood something 😅
I did actually attempt the Anne of Green Gables books when I was younger (I think because my mom liked them?) and didn’t get very far before I gave up. So I’m thinking that when they didn’t work for me when I was the target audience, they’re probably not going to work now either 😅
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Well, you did get the “Europe is big” part right, so I feel like you deserve to be proud! 😂 And in case this makes you feel even better: Part of the song is in Austrian dialect, which even non-Bavarian Germans sometimes have a hard time understanding 😉 Should you still be interested, though, you can find a transcript of the lyrics here: https://www.verunsicherung.de/diskografie/songs/neandertal_100_jahre_eav.html. I did also find a site that claims to have translated the lyrics into English (https://songstranslation.com/eav-299416/neandertal/) but the horrid grammar and the fact that they translated “Rübezahl”, which is the name of a monster from German folklore, literally into “turnip number” has me kind of suspicious that I already know what the result would be if I put the lyrics into google translate 🤣🤣🤣 But, I mean, I guess it’s a start??? 😅
The target audience of Anne of Green Gables are definitely people of all ages, though 😇 I refuse to accept anything else!
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“The Yeti skin the turnip number” wtf 😂😂😂 After reading the translated lyrics, I have doubts whether I even understand English. What a mess 😅
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I lost it when I read that 😂😂😂 The translated lyrics might even be better than the original – I mean, who wants to listen to one mythological monster hitting another when you can also have yetis skinning turnip numbers?
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Scythe was great??? I’m definitely a fan of disturbing and creepy stuff (unless it’s a film, I simply cannot deal with scary films), so that one’s going straight to my liked songs. Also, by mentioning If I Stay and Where She Went you just reminded of the ridiculous amount of tears I shed while reading them both over the course of two days.
The Hanging Tree is definitely a perfect choice for that prompt. I remember being worried about how it would actually sound in the film since while reading it I just gave it a basic melody 😅 They really did a great job. Loved reading your answers hehe
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Yay, someone who relates and doesn’t think I might be a serial-killing psychopath!! 🤣 I’m exactly the same – I am the worst scaredy-cat ever when it comes to horror/thriller movies and will either hide behind my sweatshirt or a blanket for their entirety, scream and jump at absolutely everything, or (and this is the best option) just not watch them at all. But disturbing books and music? Sign me up for those! 🤗
And ahhhhh, you’ve read If I Stay and Where She Went!!! 🥰 I didn’t quite cry over If I Stay – although I was close – but Where She Went also reduced me to tears. I just couldn’t deal with Adam’s sadness and the realization of how present the loss of Mia’s family was in her life 😭
Also, yes!! The melody my reading self gave to The Hanging Tree was so boringly basic in comparison that I’ve found myself replacing it with the movie one on rereads – which almost never happens to me 🤣 What I imagined first usually sticks! But the interpretation James Newton Howard came up with was just soooo good! 🤩 Simple, but also truly haunting and sad 😭
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I had never heard Scythe or Neandertal and they were amazing, they were so much fun I loved them. I also agree The Hanging Tree is one of the best songs from a book!
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I’m so glad to hear you liked those songs, Meena! 🥰 (I mean, if it wasn’t already obvious, I positively LOVE them!! 😁🤣 So yeah, I might be a bit biased…)
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I understand why you do! 😆
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