A Song of Ice and Fire

I can’t imagine a life without music. Songs are the key to my memory. It is truly amazing what I remember when I hear a specific song, sometimes to the point that I get goosebumps or even start to cry because I’m catapulted into a specific moment of the past. Music is memories and emotions, the past, the present, an alternate reality, challenges and triumphs, happiness and sadness, friends, landscapes and journeys, love and hate, films, series, and of course, books …

I got tagged! Yes, that came rather unexpectedly but I enjoyed answering the questions and even more making up my own ones for you. So thanks a million to the girls @ B-Team on Books for tagging me! …

Oh, it was so hard to settle with 10 names each. There are so many more which I love and some I know I love but couldn’t remember. So here are my top tens in alphabetical order …

I must admit that I’m not easy to please when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations. In my opinion, the adaptation cannot be too faithful to the novel. Every change, even if it is tiny, is noticed and although I can turn a blind eye to quite a lot of changes, there are some that drive me crazy. I know that I’m not living in a perfect world in which one to one adaptations are possible, but still. Therefore, it was really difficult to come up with good and faithful adaptations so I decided to give you a mix of different scenarios …

May started out great: I read four books in the first week! That blew me away since I hadn’t read much in April. Suddenly, everything seemed possible – even finishing off my whole utopian tbr-list. And then … then I spend two long weekends at home and everything went downhill. It’s the strangest of things, but when I’m surrounded by almost all of my beautiful ~1,300 books, I just don’t get to read at all. There’s a fast Internet connection and four horses that keep me busy. At least I somehow managed to read the book(s) for my fantasy literature seminar but instead of getting back to my list, I spontaneously decided to re-read A Game of Thrones, because we were also discussing it in class and I thought that my memory could use some refreshing. In an act of extreme desperation, I tried to read The Nightmare Affair on the very last day of the month, but I was too slow to finish it in time …

Coincidentally, there are exactly ten books on my first reads favourites 2013 shelf. They are listed according to the date I read them from January to June …

In May, there was music in the air. The task was to read one book each that somehow fits one of the following media: record, cassette, CD, and MP3. How we interpreted the connection was pretty much up to ourselves, as long as we could come up with somewhat of a decent explanation …