Taylor Swift’s Mastery Over Words Has Long Been Overlooked

Taylor Swift’s albums in order of release

I’ve been a Taylor Swift fan for years. Speak Now (2010) had come out not long before I became a fan, and I’ve followed the release of each album since then. The teenaged me loved the angst of her music and how I could relate to the songs about falling in love and experiencing heartbreak. The adult me has an appreciation for her artistry as a musician and songwriter.

When I started listening to her music, society hadn’t decided that she was a bad person yet. When the media and other people decided that she was a bad person for writing about her love life, I kept my enjoyment of her music to myself. No matter what music she released, I found myself relating to it in small ways. Getting my heart broken for the first time made me understand those songs. Falling in love for the first time made the love songs a little more meaningful. And gosh, I listened to so much of her breakup songs when I went through my first breakup.

Then she disappeared before the release of reputation and I was among the minority who loved that album’s release. People continued to hate on her music because she was seen publicly as a woman who dated a lot and as a singer who wrote a lot about past relationships. The release of Lover suddenly propelled Swift back into a positive limelight because she was writing about being in love with one man instead of her previous relationships. And now, folklore is making waves as her most acclaimed album because of its masterful writing.

So why have we overlooked her writing skills until now?

July Reading Wrap-Up

Month’s over, time to wrap-up my reading for July.

This month was harder than last because it started with a reading slump. It was also the month I moved apartments and states, so reading didn’t happen at all in the last couple of days of the month.

My original plan has been to read six fantasy books because I wanted to make a bigger dent in my TBR and also return some books back to my parents. And though my reading didn’t go as planned, I’m glad that I enjoyed the two full books I read and the other one I started. So let’s get into my quick wrap-up.

Trying Bookly For A Week

I love tracking my reading. It’s something I wrote about in a different blog post last week.

In there, I mentioned an app called Bookly. It’s a reading app meant to help you track daily reading with each book. And because I’ve nailed the annual and monthly tracking, I wanted to try the daily tracking on a more in depth level. So I re-downloaded Bookly, bought the annual subscription, and turned it into a week-long experiment to see if it would change the way I read.

Writing Lessons from WebToons

You’ve probably heard of or gotten ads for WebToon, the comic app that’s grown wildly popular over the past few years. If you’re anything like me, you resisted downloading it for ages because I didn’t want to jump on the bandwagon, and also because I didn’t really find anything that interested me. But when I finally downloaded the app, I found myself hooked.

Naturally, I’ve found my favorites among WebToons that have finished and those that are still running. And I’ve put many others on a list to read when I catch up to each new comic I’m reading.

Reading this much in a different format has made me notice story structure and the way each episode follows different characters and storylines have made me think about my own stories.

Reading & Statistics

I don’t like math, but I do like tracking my reading statistics. It’s one of the only times I find numbers interesting enough to make it part of my daily life. Something about the numbers, pie charts, and bar graphs make me happy and motivates me to read more.

In January 2018, I took Problem Solving with Computers as an easy cop-out for my math credit. Of everything I learned there, I loved the spreadsheet the most. Learning about Excel spreadsheets was intended to help us create budgets or weekly schedules, but I decided to use it as a reading tracker instead.