short n' sweet as books

book recommendations for every song on sabrina carpenter's 'short n' sweet'

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If you’re anything like me, whenever you consume a piece of media, you can’t help but think of similarities to what you’ve read, watched, or heard before. In line with this, one of my favourite things to do is thematically link songs to books, creating my own soundtrack for them in a carefully curated Spotify playlist. When I’m listening to a song or an album, I also like to pick my way through the lyrics, thinking of books that match up with them.

Like many others, I’ve had Sabrina Carpenter’s newest album ‘Short n’ Sweet’ on repeat since it was released in August. If it isn’t high up on my Spotify Wrapped this year, I may lose faith in the technology altogether. At this point I’ve listened to the album so much that I’ve learned the lyrics by heart, so here’s a list of book recommendations for every song on the album:

Taste: I’m a Fan - Sheena Patel

“I heard you're back together and if that's true
You'll just have to taste me when he's kissin' you”

I’m A Fan tells the story of an unnamed narrator's involvement in a seemingly unequal romantic relationship, as she becomes obsessed with an influencer who is sleeping with the same man she is. With a clear and unforgiving eye, Sheena Patel makes startling connections between power struggles at the heart of human relationships to those in the wider world, offering a devastating critique of social media, access and patriarchal systems.

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Please Please Please: Heartburn - Nora Ephron

“Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another
I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherfucker”

Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel discovers that her husband Mark is in love with another woman. The fact that this woman has a 'neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb' is no consolation. 

Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel is a cookery writer, and between trying to win Mark back and wishing him dead, she offers us some of her favourite recipes. 

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Good Graces: A Certain Hunger - Chelsea G. Summers

'Cause no one's more amazin'
At turnin' lovin' into hatred”

Dorothy Daniels has always had a voracious - and adventurous - appetite. From her idyllic farm-to-table childhood (homegrown tomatoes, thick slices of freshly baked bread) to the heights of her career as a food critic (white truffles washed down with Barolo straight from the bottle) Dorothy has never been shy about indulging her exquisite tastes - even when it lead to her plunging an ice pick into her lover's neck.

There is something inside Dorothy that makes her different from everybody else. Something she's finally ready to confess.

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Sharpest Tool: Normal People - Sally Rooney

“You're confused and I'm upsеt,
but we never talk about it”

Marianne is the young, affluent, intellectual wallflower; Connell is the boy everyone likes, shadowed by his family’s reputation and poverty. Unlikely friends, and later lovers, their small town beginnings in rural Ireland are swiftly eclipsed by the heady worlds of student Dublin. Gradually their intense, mismatched love becomes a battleground of power, class, and the falsehoods they choose to believe.

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Coincidence: Green Dot - Madeleine Gray

“And you've lost all your common sense
What a coincidence”

Hera is in her mid-twenties, which seems young to everyone except people in their mid-twenties. Since leaving school, she has been trying to kick and scream into existence a life she cares about, but with little success so far. Until she meets Arthur.

He works with her, he is older than her, he is also married. But in her soulless office - the large cold room she feels destined to spend her life in - he is a source of much-needed sustenance. And though Hera has previously dated women, she soon falls headlong into a workplace romance that will quickly consume her life.

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Bed Chem: Book Lovers - Emily Henry

“Maybe it's all in my head
But I bеt we'd have really good bеd chem”

One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming...Nora is a cut-throat literary agent at the top of her game. Her whole life is books. Charlie is an editor with a gift for creating bestsellers. And he's Nora's work nemesis.

Nora has been through enough break-ups to know she's the woman men date before they find their happy-ever-after. That's why Nora's sister has persuaded her to swap her desk in the city for a month's holiday in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina. It's a small town straight out of a romance novel, but instead of meeting sexy lumberjacks, handsome doctors or cute bartenders, Nora keeps bumping into... Charlie. She's no heroine. He's no hero. So can they take a page out of an entirely different book?

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Espresso: Slow Days Fast Company - Eve Babitz

“Now he's thinkin' 'bout me every night, oh
Is it that sweet? I guess so”

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. 

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Dumb & Poetic: Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck

“Cherry-pick lines like they're words you invented
Gold star for highbrow manipulation”

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power.

And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

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Slim Pickins: Emma - Jane Austen

“Guess I'll end this life alone, I am not dramatic
These are just the thoughts that pass right through me”

Although described by Jane Austen as a character 'whom no one but myself will much like', the irrepressible Emma Woodhouse is one of her most beloved heroines. Clever, rich and beautiful, she sees no need for marriage, but loves interfering in the romantic lives of others, until her matchmaking plans unravel, with consequences that she never expected.

 

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Juno: The Hating Game - Sally Thorne

“You make me wanna make you fall in love
Oh, late at night, I'm thinking 'bout you”

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman sit across from each other every day, and they hate each other.Not dislike. Not begrudgingly tolerate. HATE. Lucy can't understand Joshua's joyless, uptight approach to his job and refusal to smile. Joshua is clearly baffled by Lucy's overly bright clothes, quirkiness, and desire to be liked.

Now they're up for the same promotion and Lucy, usually a determined people-pleaser, has had enough: it's time to take him down. But as the tension between Lucy and Joshua reaches its boiling point, it's clear that the real battle has only just begun . . .

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Lie To Girls: Piglet - Lottie Hazell

“I've never seen an ugly truth that I can't bend
To something that looks better
I'm stupid, but I'm clever
Yeah, I can make a shitshow look a whole lot like forever”

For Piglet – an unshakable childhood nickname – getting married is her opportunity to reinvent. Together, Kit and Piglet are the picture of domestic bliss – effortless hosts, planning a covetable wedding ... But if a life looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Thirteen days before they are due to be married, Kit reveals an awful truth, cracking the façade Piglet has created. It has the power to strip her of the life she has so carefully built, so smugly shared. To do something about it would be to self-destruct. But what will it cost her to do nothing? As the hours count down to their ‘big day’, Piglet is torn between a growing appetite and the desire to follow the recipe, follow the rules. Surely, with her husband, she could be herself again. Wouldn’t it be a waste for everything to curdle now?

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Don’t Smile: Sorrow and Bliss - Meg Mason

“Don't smile because it happened, baby
Cry because it's over”

Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets.So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave?

Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain. Forced to return to her childhood home to live with her dysfunctional, bohemian parents, Martha has one last chance to find out whether a life is ever too broken to fix - or whether, maybe, by starting over, she will get to write a better ending for herself.