Top Ten Tuesday

This is a neat weekly feature over at a blog I really enjoy, The Broke and the Bookish.  They read books similar to some that I've been reviewing, and they're fun and they write well.  Totally worth checking out.

Top Ten Most Unique Books I've Read

1. The Madman's Daughter trilogy by Megan Shepherd.  The first one, The Madman's Daughter, is a re-imagining of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells.  In this one, the point of view is the teenage daughter of Dr. Moreau.  The second one, Her Dark Curiosity, is even better:  it's a re-telling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.  But get this:  Megan Shepherd is crazy talented and she re-told Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the same characters from The Madman's Daughter and advanced the story and it was fantastic.

2. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City, both by Ransom Riggs.  These are worth picking up and looking at just for the crazy historic photographs in them.  I recommend reading them because they're great, but at least go look at the photographs.

3. My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... And Other Things You Can't Ask Martha by Jolie Kerr.  Actually still reading this, but it's just fantastic!  It's a cleaning book that's so well-written I'm reading it straight through like a novel.  And the tips actually work!  My cleaning life is getting better and better.  Full disclosure:  I picked it up just for the title and was rewarded with much more.

4. My Lobotomy by Howard Dully.  A memoir of a guy who had an honest-to-goodness icepick lobotomy as a kid.  Mind-blowing.  (See what I did there?)

5. Hidden Treasures: What Museums Can't or Won't Show You by Harriet Baskas.  This book is exactly what the title says:  a collection of photographs and short essays on really crazy, kooky, unique, gross, or weird things that museums have in their collections/archives, but that they don't display for one reason or another.

6. The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal.  A fairytale of syphilis.  <---Those are the author's own words to describe her book.  Aren't you intrigued?  Bonus:  incredibly well-written.

7. Every Day by David Levithan.  The main character is gender neutral.  I can't think of how to explain this, but the main character wakes up in a different body every day, and sometimes it's a guy's body and sometimes it's a girl's body.  But you can't use "he" or "she" to refer to A (the main character) because they don't identify themselves as either.  I thought it'd be hard to read the book, but David Levithan does a great job with it.

8. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  So many unique things about this book:  the narrator of the story is Death personified; the way Death keeps talking about the color of the sky when people die; and in the middle of the book is a section that is meant to look like handwritten pages from a book that is part of the story... so a book within a book.

9. Red by Allison Cherry.  This book isn't going to win any great literature awards, but I enjoyed it.  It's a light little read that you could take on vacay.  The premise is a whole town just for redheads and the redder your hair, the higher your social status.  But what happens when the secret gets out that Scarletville's most popular girl is actually a brunette who dyes her hair red?  Full disclosure:  I'm a redhead.

10. By the Numbers series by Janet Evanovich.  These are the Stephanie Plum mysteries.  They make me laugh out loud and I highly, highly, highly recommend them.  Stephanie Plum is about my age and she's a kick-ass bail bondswoman.  Her sidekick is Lula, an extremely rotund ex-hooker.  Stephanie is being pursued romantically by Joe, a handsome clean cop and Ranger, a dangerous steamy-hot personal security guy.  Then there's her mom, who just wants her to get married and have babies and her crazy grandma.

I could probably do a Top 50 list on this topic!  These were just the first ones to come to mind.  I work in a library and I'm always grabbing books that look crazy unique.  Like Would You Kill the Fat Man?  Come on... you know that sounds intriguing...

What about you?  What are the Top 10 Most Unique Books in your reading life?