13 Books I’ve Loved Across the Eras & Their Corresponding Taylor Swift Lyrics

“’Tis the Damn Season,” Toronto Swifties! Taylor Swift is finally here and staying for an entire “Fortnight.” While I’m not one among the “The Lucky One(s)” with concert tickets, I still look forward to the upcoming weeks as an opportunity to look back on the eras.

As a life-long “Dear Reader” who finds nothing else in life to be “Sweeter than Fiction,” my taste in literature has certainly evolved with age. Depending on the year (or my mood), my answer to the “Question…?” what is your favourite book? can vary greatly.

Here are 13 book I’ve loved across my own personal eras. While this is by no means a comprehensive list of all my favourite books, they’re compiled here because of the Taylor Swift songs I associate with each of them.

High School Era

“Maybe I’m just a girl on a mission / But I’m ready to fly”

— Taylor Swift, Track 4, “A Place in the World”

Cammie Morgan, sophomore at Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Woman, often feels like she’s invisible—but since she goes to a school for spies, this is actually a good thing.

Swift debuted as a country artist, but don’t tell me “A Place in the World” wouldn’t fit on the soundtrack of a 2000s teen girl movie. The Gallagher Girls series by Ally Carter, where spy thriller meets prep school drama, is one of my favourite teen girl book series from my own childhood.

While I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You is the first book, I personally think it takes until book two, Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, for the series to really find its legs.

“And I love you for giving me your eyes / Staying back and watching me shine”

— Fearless, Track 12, “The Best Day”

The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick and its subsequent sequels are another (less thriller, more wholesome) teen girl series I adored during my own coming of age, following four very different girls—farm girl Jess, bookworm Emma, fashionista Megan, and hockey player Cassidy—who are thrown together when their moms decide to start a mother-daughter book club together.

“The Best Day” is, of course, Swift’s tribute to her own mother. With a lot of heart and warmth, Emma, Jess, Megan, and Cassidy navigate very different relationships (and conflicts) with their very different mothers—similarly bookish, absentee, activist-minded, or formerly famous.

This series really has potential to become your favourite book club’s favourite book club!

“You learn my secrets and you figure out why I’m guarded / You say we’ll never make my parents’ mistakes”

— Speak Now, Track 1, “Mine”

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is set in a university, yes, but I read it back in high school and I was absolutely obsessed. Naturally, I overly identified with the socially anxious, fanfiction-writing protagonist, Cath, but I think this book stayed with me for so long—even when I didn’t jive as much with other Books About Fandom that have since been published—because it’s not just a Book About Fan. It’s about growing and changing as a writer, a sister, a daughter, and a person in this unfamiliar (and thus, scary) new environment, even when you’ve convinced yourself that you’re perfectly fine the way you are. (Spoiler Alert: You’re Not.)

Cath’s arc of learning to take risks, breaking out of bad social habits, and opening herself up to new worlds definitely contained some lessons that a young Fei needed to learn, and similar themes also run throughout “Mine.”

(Plus—and I’ll admit this is a bit of a stretch—“Mine” is structured around an “imagined love story,” and isn’t that exactly what Cath does with her Snowbaz fanfiction?)

University Era

“That’s when I came upon a book covered in cobwebs / Story of a romance torn apart by fate”

— Speak Now, Bonus Track, “Timeless”

The first time I read This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, I was a university student by both day and night (and an aspiring writer by later night). Since then, it has retained its place as my Top Book Recommendation for over five years.

I can tell you that, like “Timeless,” the love story in Time War endures across time and space. I can also tell you what literally happens: Two time-travelling soldiers on opposite sides of a war exchange letters and slowly fall in love, and they’re both girls(ish)!

None of that actually describes the Sheer Experience that is Reading This Novella, but sometimes, aren’t the best books the ones that are the hardest to summarize?

“And all I feel / In my stomach is butterflies / The beautiful kind, makin’ up for lost time / Takin’ flight, makin’ me feel like”

— Red, Track 14, “Everything Has Changed”

Can I highlight a friend’s favourite book on my list of favourite books? Yes, because In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan became one of my favourite books after their recommendation.

When Elliot Schafer, our favourite snarky redheaded Unchosen One, crosses the border between the mortal world and the magical one, he immediately starts questioning everything. Beginning as a web serial, In Other Lands contains everything you could possibly want in a YA fantasy: a magical camp training child soldiers, a matriarchal and misandrist elven society, a gay awakening (or two), a serious case of battle burnout.

Am I the only one who interprets “Everything Has Changed” as a friends-to-lovers song? To me, it’s not the meeting of a new love interest that “changed everything,” but rather, it’s the realization that you’ve come to view someone you’ve always known in a whole new light. Not to spoil Elliot’s romantic entanglements but…he definitely goes through that journey.

“Did you think we’d be fine? / Still got scars on my back from your knife”

— 1989, Track 8, “Bad Blood”

In Vicious by V.E. Schwab, Victor and Eli are college roommates, then best friends, then co-conspirators in experimental science, and now super-powered super-enemies. After the death of a classmate, Eli walks away without a scratch as a free man, while Victor rots in prison for a decade; once he gets out, Victor sets his sights on serving up a big, cold dish of revenge.

I don’t think I have to explain why I paired this book with “Bad Blood.”

This is another book that was recommended to me by a friend! The premise of toxic homoerotic super-powered frenemies drew me in, but Schwab’s immersive writing style is what really made me stick to the page–and pre-order the sequel, and read a few other books she’s written.

“Late in the night, the city’s asleep / Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep”

— Reputation, Track 10, “King of My Heart”

I actually think Reputation might be Swift’s most romantic album (even though the next one is literally called Lover). At the very least, I think it’s got some of her most romantic songs, one being “King of My Heart.”

Lots of queer teens and young adults have a weird relationship with romance—including me, and including the titular character in Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli. I’m so grateful that queer teens today have such an abundance of queer teen media to enjoy—but personally speaking, back when I was in university and just starting to come out to friends and family, Love, Simon was the first movie I saw on the silver screen that depicted a queer teen romance.

It’s admittedly a bit cheesy for my present-day self’s taste, but back then, I didn’t even know how much I needed this book.

20s Era

“I want to drive away with you / I want your complications too”

— Lover, Track 8, “Paper Rings”

I read People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry while I was, well, on vacation. If a book is a meal, I usually prefer my romance on the side—a small plate of fries to snack on, or maybe an indulgent dessert. People We Meet on Vacation gradually grew on me, giving me a deeper appreciation of the genre, just as the main characters gradually grew on me too.

“It’s Nice to Have a Friend” might be the obvious choice from Lover to describe Poppy and Alex’s ten-year journey from best friends to lovers, but I picked “Paper Rings” because it’s more playful, more befitting the joyful fun and comforting familiarity these two have with each other.

“And if I’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too”

— Folklore, Track 5, “My Tears Ricochet”

I can’t think of this song—this specific line—without thinking about Fang Runin, the protagonist of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War, and I can’t think of The Poppy War trilogy without wanting to cry.

Though Kuang’s found a lot of success in her stand-alones (Babel, Yellowface), Rin’s story—from orphan girl to scholarship student at a military school to a shaman soldier in a brutal war—really packs an emotional gut punch because of the long road she walked to get to the end.

I picked this particular lyric from “My Tear Ricochet” because (Minor Spoiler Alert!) of Rin’s connection to the Phoenix . If I start talking about how other parts of the song relates to her character, I’m afraid I’d be heading into Major Spoiler territory.

“They told me all of my cages were mental / So I got wasted like all my potential”

— Folklore, Track 9, “This Is Me Trying”

The unnamed character in the epistolary-like Chemistry by Weike Wang begins the story by turning down a proposal from her long-term boyfriend and quitting her academic career in a prestigious STEM program—then spends the next two years grappling with this decision while managing the expectations of her Chinese parents.

“This Is Me Trying” is a rueful, regret-tinged song Swift wrote and published at the height of the pandemic all about trying to live up to one’s potential—and if not that, then just trying to get through the day. While Chemistry was published in 2017 and I read it pre-COVID (in 2019), looking back, the narrator’s feelings of restlessness, uncertainty, and confusion with life, career, family, and love really reflected how I (and many others) felt during that long quarantine.

“They expected me to find somewhere / Some perspective, but I sat and stared”

– Evermore, Bonus Track, “Right Where You Left Me”

At the time of writing this, The City in Glass by Nghi Vo is the most recent book I’ve finished. It has jumped onto my list of favourite books because 1) I’ve been a fan of Vo since The Empress of Salt and Fortune and 2) it’s a story about stories, and I eat that shit up every time.

The narrator of “Right Where You Left Me” is (perhaps unwillingly) stuck in place after a break-up; in contrast, the demon Vitrine, quite stubbornly, chooses to stay in Azril, the city she built and bred, after an army of angels ruthlessly razed it to the ground. The City in Glass explores themes of grief, memories, legacy, and moving on—all the while it treats you to lush, detailed, and beautifully written descriptions of the vibrant, dazzling, and ever-changing port city.

“God rest my soul, I miss who I used to be / The tomb won’t close, stained glass windows in my mind / I regret you all the time”

— Midnights, Bonus Track, “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”

To know that I’m a book lover is to know that I’m a huge fan of The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. If the premise of “lesbian necromancers in space” doesn’t hook you, how about I say that Tamsyn Muir somehow manages to be both one of the funniest and one of the most heart-wrenching writers I’ve ever read.

The first book, Gideon the Ninth, follows the titular character, a wise-cracking butch lesbian knight, her childhood nemesis / bone witch / reverend daughter Harrowhark, and seven other necromancer-cavalier pairs from other Great Houses as they go through a series of trials with the hopes of ascending and becoming one of God’s Favourite OOMFs—while someone among their numbers is secretly murdering everyone else, one by one.

Without getting in the weeds of how and why the sequel, Harrow the Ninth, follows a different titular narrator, I’ll just say that when my fellow TLT-reading friends and I listened to “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” for the first time, we all went, “Tomb?” The themes of religious trauma and guilt in this song very much echos the religious trauma and guilt Harrowhark carries—especially in her relationship to the actual character of God, who is also a necromancer and the Emperor of the Nine Houses, who is also just some guy.

I cannot overstate how much The Locked Tomb series has changed my brain chemistry—as one of the first queer adult speculative series I’ve read and adored, as an instant conversation-starter I’ve had with countless sapphic readers at SFF conventions.

I think of her at night. I weep over her often. I dream of Alecto the Ninth the way others dream of The Winds of Winter.

“There in her glittering prime / The lights refract sequined stars off her silhouette every night”

— The Tortured Poets Department, Track 13, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”

If you want to read about a tortured singer whose heavyweight emotional baggage has never stopped them from putting on a good show, then Decibel Jones is your guy. The main character of Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente is the washed-up, alcoholic lead singer of the one-hit wonder band Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, which is somehow Earth’s only hope at competing in the Galactic Grand Prix—an intergalactic singing competition created after every civilian in the Milky Way got tired of wars and, instead, decided to put on the best talent show this universe has ever seen.

Win, and you’ll hold universal bragging rights. Place dead last as a newcomer, and your entire species will be wiped out.

Yet another book that attracted me by premise and sold me on the writing, Space Opera’s genre-blending, hyper-maximalist style really inspired me to infuse more comedy into my own writing, which often has a tendency to lean toward the melodramatic and the tragic. Like “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” when viewed in comparison to the rest of the album, sometimes the superficial appearance of lightheartedness can give even more emotional weight to the sad and the dreary and the tortuous.