Tune In Tuesday: Soundtracking Anna and the French Kiss
This entire month Tune in Tuesday, hosted by the lovely Miss Ginger at GReadsBooks, is dedicated to sharing playlists or songs that remind you of a particular book or scene or what have you.
So this week I’m going to share the songs that played through my head while reading the adorable Stephanie Perkins’s adorable debut novel Anna and the French Kiss.
The book is set at a boarding school for international students in Paris, which is basically everything I ever wanted as a high school student. And because I lurve me some France, I speak French and listen to a good amount of French music. (I know. I’m one of those people.) So whilst reading this book the songs I thought of were mostly French tunes.
1. A Cause Des Garcons—Yelle
This song is adorable and bouncy and a little bit whimsy, which is very much the tone of this book. (Not that there aren’t serious themes and moments. But, overall, it’s a fun read.) It might be a little too pop for the character of Anna, but something about this song just reminds me of being in high school and goofing off with friends.
2. C’est Si Bon—Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Anita Briem
Preservation Hall Jazz Band – C’est Si Bon <— Click this! It will take you to Spotify. 🙂
I ADORE this version this song. It’s light and airy and flirty and sung in both English and French. So, basically it’s perfect.
3. Quelqun’un M’a Dit—Carla Bruni
There is something so incredibly sexy about this song and Bruni’s voice to me. I love love love it and listen to it on repeat fairly often. Fun facts: This song is on the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack (it’s probably more appropriate on that soundtrack than this one, but OH WELL.) and, if you’ve seen Midnight in Paris, Carla Bruni is the gorgeous tour guide that Owen Wilson tracks down to help him translate the Marion Cotillard’s diary.
4. Love Like a Sunset, Parts I and II—Phoenix
So, I sort of feel like a cheater because I know Stephanie Perkins has both of these listed on her own Anna and the French Kiss playlists, BUT when reading these books I definitely heard lots of this song in my head. The way it builds and falls apart and gets a little confused at times and ultimately resolves is very Anna and Étienne.
So those are some of my Anna and the French Kiss picks! If you have any to add, or would like to turn me on to French musicians that you know and love, please do feel free! And also, if you’ve not read Anna and you’re looking for something that is light and fun, but still has a lot of heart and growth, I definitely definitely recommend it.
What’s Making Me Happy {2}
This week has actually been a little trying for me. I’m waiting to hear about whether a fairly large life-change is going to happen or not and I am NOT good at waiting. At all. So, I’ve been working on my patience.
It’s not my favorite.
And then things at work are . . . fine, but I’m at the point where I’d really love to just get paid to write full time. Alas, that requires some extremely hard work and dedication and, let’s face it, a bit of luck and a lot of talent. So, this week has been a little bit angsty in addition to being sort of blah.
But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t things that made the week just a little bit happier for me.
1. Yoga
I am not a gym person. At all. I loathe them, actually. But, as I need to get my work out on a couple times a week, I do yoga. Yoga works for me. It doesn’t work for a lot of people, but I greatly enjoy it. On Thursday I did NOT want to go to my yoga class for any reason. I’d had a weird day and I just wanted to go home and eat Girl Scout cookies and read Storm of Swords until I fell asleep. But, I made myself go to yoga instead. And y’all. It is ridiculous how much better I felt mentally after that class. Yoga!
2. Smaller, Less Frequent Loan Payments!
I went to grad school and incurred a fairly large amount of student debt in the process. And because I don’t make a whole heck of a lot of money, I’m constantly concerned about money. But this week I got word that, after applying for income-based loan repayment, I have been approved for that and my payments are now smaller and less frequent. This might come back to bite me in the ass in the future, but for now, I do not care. Bring on . . . well, I’ll most likely just put it in my savings account. 🙂
3. Friends in Town
Two of my friends from undergrad are in town this weekend! One now lives in Connecticut, so I see her fairly often, but the other is going to law school at Vanderbilt now, so I see her less often. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen her since July or August. And this is technically her Spring Break and she came to see ME. *beams* So we’re gonna play this weekend. They’ve both been to NYC before, so I think I’m gonna drag them to the New York Public Library tour and maybe over to Brooklyn Flea instead of going to be tourist sites. (Not that NYPL and Brooklyn Flea don’t have tourists. It just isn’t Time Square. *shudders*)
4. Trader Joe’s Toilet Paper
Ok. This might be a very singularly “me” thing, but I find toilet paper to be ridiculously expensive. So the other day while I was in my friendly neighborhood Trader Joe’s, I actually walked down their home aisle with the cleaners and shampoos and paper goods. Normally I don’t venture there because I (strangely) assumed everything would be crazy expensive and entirely organic and would smell like patchouli. Turns out, NOT SO MUCH. Not only do all of their bath products and household cleans a) smell great, and b) cost not a whole lot, but their super soft toilet paper is only $4 for six rolls! FOUR DOLLARS. I know that this a weird thing to be happy about, but . . . I’m still happy about it.
So that’s that! I hope that there were at least a couple things in your life this week that also made you happy. If you want to, feel free to share a couple of them in comments.
Moving!
Hey y’all!
I know it has been A LONG WHILE since y’all’ve heard from me.
I took a pretty massive break from the book blogging, and blogging in general, and that is why.
BUT. After my break, I made some blogging decision, one of which was to move blogs.
Though my new blog isn’t strictly book-related, I’m such a bookish little thing that there is a LOT of chatter about books at the new site. And also about random crap I like. 🙂
I won’t delete this blog, because I can’t bear to think that all the content I wrote and created and put up here would just—POOF, be gone. So, this blog will hang out as is. Just in case you were wondering.
So, if you’d like to follow/subscribe/change links over to my new blog I would very much love to have you over there! The web address is: bethanyelarson.wordpress.com.
Hope to see you at the new place!
What I’m Writing: Vowing to Get Back in the Groove
For about a year and half now, I have been writing various projects that I hope will one day become books.
The problem with this is threefold:
- I have LOTS of plot ideas for books I want to write
- I tend to be super, over-the-top in love with an idea for a month or two, will write a lot, and will then get burned out on that idea and start working on a new book
- My life sort of went BAZOO in November and is just now starting to level out.
So now that I’m feeling better about myself and my relationships and my fiscal stability and my life in general (that makes it sound like I was losing it. I wasn’t. But I needed some time to figure some things out.), I finally want to start writing again. With all this in mind, I opened up the Google Doc of my work in progress (WIP) and just read the thing in one sitting. And, actually, I’m really happy with how it had shaped up prior to my very long writing break.
I’m very pleasantly surprised at exactly how much I like this story. I kind of thought that I’d end up hating a lot of it and wanting to change things or re-arrange the timeline or nix characters or something, but that’s not the case at all. I mean, sure, there are a couple little tweaks I want to make here and there, but no major book surgery required! YAY!
Now, for those of you who are unaware of my YA-novel-writing goal, here’s what it is: I want to finish this WIP, which I’ve been unimaginatively calling Airport Book (because a lot of it takes place in an airport), find a couple really trustworthy and honest critique partners, get feedback, edit the shit out of this sucker, and then query agents. Writing in list form makes all of that seem strangely simple, in a “so this is what is going to happen” way.
I know better than that.
The writing process itself is hard enough, and I have absolutely zero fanciful ideas about how piece-of-cakey it’ll be to get an agent.
I know better than that, too.
But, dreams are hard right? And. And. It’s not like I’m writing only for the purpose of getting published. I’m writing these stories because I feel like I need to. The characters and plots and settings are just hanging out in my brain and if I don’t write them down, I’m pretty sure I’d start talking to these characters as if they were real people.
I really don’t want to go down that path.
So! I am officially proclaiming myself back in Writing Mode. And I need y’all to hold me to it. Ask me how it’s going, send me motivational tweets/emails, send me WRITE MOAR tweets/emails, and please do annoy the hell out of me about it.
I mean that.
And! I hereby vow to publish a weekly What I’m Writing post to update all y’all on how I’m doing with the writing and what’s going on and what I find challenging from week to week. I’ll probably even share a few excerpts. (Maybe.)
So that’s that! I hope you’re all having a lovely Friday!
Game of Thrones.
“Seven Devils” by Florence + the Machine.
Bethany Larson 
