A question I can't exactly ask the right way.

[southerngirlwriter]

Have you ever heard a song or read a novel that was just....YOU....in some weird way you can't describe? Like, if anyone really heard that song, heard it several times and really got the....hell, I don't know, let's say, for lack of a better term, "emotional essence" of it, that they would understand something pretty fundamental about you?? Has a novel ever affected you this way?

Forgive me; my closest friends and I are all intuitives, so we don't have to verbalize nearly so much -- hard to put into words -- they both "got" this question, and the resulting conversation lasted hours and was great fun.

Here are mine:

Song: Sick Cycle Carousel, by Lifehouse
Novel: I Know This Much is True, by Wally Lamb

Alternates (more applicable to a younger me):

Song: Forty Years by Counting Crows
Novel: A Prayer for Owen Meany

I'm going out for awhile, but when I get back I will answer any "WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT" questions as best I can. :-)

[JohnKleeb]

1. what you mean exactly

I got a part of a song stuck in my head right now.

[stepnw1f]

4. Schnarf!

[JohnKleeb]

5. huh?

[MrScorpio]

2. Never, never gonna give you up by Barry White

inside the Company: CIA Diary by Philip Agee.

This is my life in a nutshell

[sendero]

3. Absolutely....

... but I won't name the songs because they are too personal :)

[Nikia]

6. All the time. That's why I like literature and music.

They aren't always "me" but how much I like a writing or pieve of music often has to do with how much I related to it emotionally. That's what art does for me.
The novel that comes to mind right now that was "me" is Anna Kareina by Leo Tolstoy. I don't relate to Anna much as I think she is responsible for her on undoing even though her lover was a major jerk. The character that I related to more was Levin the happy husband and farmer (minor land holding noble) who wanted to kill himself because life lacked meaning for him. I did not cry when Anna killed herself. I cried when I read the lines that went something like this: "Some days these thoughts were so bad that he had to hide the rope to prevent him from hanging himself, but he did not hang himself or shoot himself. Instead, he went on living.
Strangely, I was not depressed at that moment. Am I depressed in general? Ask me when it is not winter. Life has to have a bigger meaning for me though to be worth living. Fortunately, there are those things.

[NightTrain]

7. In think I know what you mean

SONG: Joe South, "Games People Play." Heard that record for the first time when I was 19 (in 1985). South's lyrics beautifully articulated why I had been feeling so heartsick over the last couple of years.

NOVEL: W. Somerset Maugham, "Of Human Bondage." I was amazed at how much of myself I saw in the protagonist, Philip Carey. And "Bondage" was published 51 years before my birth!