Words of Wisdom for Your Wednesday
It’s Tuesday, it’s Tune in Tuesday, the day I share music with y’all.
And since it’s May still, Ginger at GReads! has declared this to be random playlist month, so today y’all are getting a sampling of five songs from my (Sounds like) Americana playlist on Spotify.
This is a weird little playlist, in that it started out as very alt-folk, rootsy kind of stuff and has become a little less that and a little more alt-indie sounds. And then I realized a bunch of bands on the playlist, originally called Americana for reasons that I don’t really know how to defend, aren’t actually American.
Because, you know, we live in an international world these days and a group British boys and Icelandic musicians have learned how to play the banjo to confuse our brains. How dare they. (I’m totally kidding. I want everyone to play the banjo.)
So here it is, a sampling of my annoyingly titled (Sounds like) Americana playlist.
1. Die Die Die—Avett Brothers
2. Slow and Steady—Of Monsters and Men (They are from ICELAND. I like this information.)
3. Hundred Dollars—Punch Brothers
4. I Love You, But I Don’t Know What to Say—Ryan Adams
5. My Father’s Father—The Civil Wars
Et voila! A Tuesday playlist for this Tune in Tuesday.
Tune in Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Ginger at GReads!
What’s Making Me Happy {12}
So this week I am yet again without my computer.
I had to take it back to the Apple store because when I took it to them to get fixed a month ago…they didn’t actually fix it.
Bastards.
But now they’re going to remedy that and fix it fo’ free!!! So I get to struggle along without my Macbook all week and use my iPhone and Nook in place of the Macbook. Technology is sort of amazing.
And that definitely makes me happy.
1. Rose Leslie
If you haven’t watched weither season one of Downton Abbey or the current season of Game of Thrones, you are a) missing out on great TV and b) missing out on the joy that is Rose Leslie.
Now, I could be biased because she’s playing Ygritte, one of my favorite characters in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. But y’all, after watching her in Downton Abbey and completely falling in love with her charm on that show, when they announced that she would play Ygritte, I was like OH HELL YES, CASTING PEOPLE. *high fives all around* And I have not been disappointed. She is all of things I wanted Ygritte to be. In fact, she may be MORE than all of the things. And the chemistry between her and Kit Harington is spot on. (We won’t even talk about how jealous I am of the fact that she gets to egregiously hit on Jon Snow all the time.)
And after watching this video from Nylon Magazine of her talking about getting drunk and dancing and listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, I am harboring a serious girl crush.
2. The Weather
It is perfect and amazing and gorgeous. Finally.
3. Trampled by Turtles cover Arcade Fire
And those are the things making me happy this week! Happy Sunday everyone!
TGIF: Why I’m a Book Blogger
It is Friday. The day that begnis with Fri-. The day that denotes that the blessed weekend is OH-SO close.
It’s also the day I answer a question posed by the lovely and loveable Ginger at GReads!
A Book Blogger is Born: What made you decide to start your very own book blog?
WELL.
This is sort of a screwed up story, actually.
So, my background is in journalism. But I also love reading and particularly enjoy YA. When I first moved to NYC, things were a little rough. Not, like, I was out on the street hooking or anything, but there was a lot of hand-wringing and several calls home tearfully begging for money and one particularly horrible temp job, but hey it paid the bills. And though I was freelancing some articles here and there, freelancing articles does not pay well. And I’d been blogging for awhile (not about books. More about TV/pop culture) and had a blog going, but it wasn’t getting a ton of traffic and I had no idea what to do to turn it around.
So. I sort of abandoned my personal blog and started a blog in which I chronicled my time playing World of Warcraft, which I started playing for the purpose of writing about it. (Turns out World of Warcraft is freaking hard and a bitch to get through and very very OMG SO VERY time-consuming. But it’s fun. And the storylines are cool. If you’re into that sort of thing.) So that happened for awhile. Then I got an internship at a publishing house and that turned into my first job, and there was a very lovely coworker there named Michelle. (Who has a snazzy new blog. You should check it out.) Michelle and I bonded over YA books and TV shows and our mutual appreciation for Andrew Garfield’s face. And one day as we were chatting about some book we had both read and loved, she asked why I didn’t have a YA book blog.
LIGHTBULB.
So I went home and started one. And started following other book bloggers on Twitter and inserting myself into their conversations and reading and blogging and blah blah blah, here we are today.
TA-DAH!
And I’m so glad to be a part of the book blogging community. Everyone is supportive and fun and nice and everyone love books, and it’s just the best.
Happy Friday, y’all!
TGIF is a weekly meme hosted by Ginger at GReads!
Review: Unbreak My Heart
Title: Unbreak My Heart
Author: Melissa Walker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Children’s Books
Release Date: May 22, 2012
Format: ePub via Netgalley
Sophomore year broke Clementine Williams’ heart. She fell for her best friend’s boyfriend and long story short: he’s excused, but Clem is vilified and she heads into summer with zero social life. Enter her parents’ plan to spend the summer on their sailboat. Normally the idea of being stuck on a tiny boat with her parents and little sister would make Clem break out in hives, but floating away sounds pretty good right now. Then she meets James at one of their first stops along the river. He and his dad are sailing for the summer and he’s just the distraction Clem needs. Can he break down Clem’s walls and heal her broken heart? Told in alternating chapters that chronicle the year that broke Clem’s heart and the summer that healed it, Unbreak My Heart is a wonderful dual love story that fans of Sarah Dessen, Deb Caletti, and Susane Colasanti will flock to.—Goodreads
You know what I like?
Books about family.
I mean, books about boys and friends and supernatural things that are sexy are all well and good, but sometimes I just want to read something that is a little closer to what my life was actually like as a teenager.
Though my family never took me on a summer adventure in as close of quarters as a boat, we definitely took a lot of road trips, and when I was 15, I went with my dad and sister on a cruise.
I do not recommend taking 15-year-olds on cruises.
But! I really loved the way Ms. Melissa Walker portrayed the healing power of family in Unbreak My Heart. (You KNOW you’re singing the Toni Braxton song in your head right now.) I also liked that the reason the main character, Clem, was so upset with herself was because of a fairly minor situation that was blown out of proportion. Because that is SUCH a teenager thing to do. I kept expecting it to be some huge, knock-down-drag-out, completely unforgiveable thing, but not so much. It was just a situation that, yes, was a little unwileldy but was taken the wrong way and because teenage girls are ridiculous, the boy in the scenario gets forgiven and the best friend doesn’t.
Girls are reallydumb sometimes.
But I liked that the situation at hand, which takes quite awhile to finally be unveiled, was something that wasn’t ultimately life-shattering. Just something that would require a learning process. And Clem definitely learns all about self-forgiveness and hope and the insane process of moving on. Which is a super important thing to learn and understand before you go to college and do completely embarrassing, ridiculous things ALL THE TIME. (Not that I did completely embarrassing, ridiculous things in college. NEVER. NOT I. 😉 )
And of course there is a charming boy around to help Clem out with the moving on process as well. Since charming boys are, you know, KEY to the moving on process.
Overall, this book is a great summer read. It’s not so emotional that you’ll be sobbing as you tan, but it’s not so cheerful that you’ll want to strangle the characters before throwing your book in the ocean/lake/river/man-made inner-city park watershed thing either.
Bethany Larson 