Top Ten Most Unique Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, and you can find more about this meme here.This week's list is the top ten most unique books I've read.

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
I think probably everyone knows about this book by now, but in case you don't...The Book Thief tells the story of a young German girl named Liesel who is living through World War Two and The Holocaust. What makes this book so unique is the fact that it is narrated by death. It's seriously amazing!

2. Atonement by Ian McEwan
This one is also set in the 40's and it primarily follows the story of Robbie Turner, Cecelia and Briony Tallis. The story seems really simple, but when you look close, you can actually notice how many different layers of the narrative that there is. As my Literature essays from last year on this will tell you, the story may be following Cecelia or Robbie but they are being controlled by Briony, who of course, is only McEwan's puppet. SO GOOD.

3. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
This another very popular one. For those of you who don't know, this is a fairytale but also sort of a parody of every fairytale ever. This 'fairytale' however, is only one of the stories within the book, there's also the story of the narrator and his grandson taking place in parallel to the first story.

4. When We Wake by Karen Healey
This one isn't on the list for its unique narrative style but actually for the uniqueness of the story. I read this book about a week ago, but the moment I finished it I had to put it on the list. This is a YA Dystopian, which may leave you guys with some questions about its 'uniqueness' but basically...this book is a YA Dystopian set in Melbourne, Australia. Maybe this isn't nearly as cool for those of you who don't live in Melbourne, but for those who do (like me), this is seriously awesome.

5. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
For those of you who have read this, probably know why this book is on here. There isn't just the one thing that is unique about this book, but a couple. For one, the writing style is quite different- there's a sort of 'accent' or 'dialect' to this book that I can't really explain. Secondly, the plot is amazing and mind-blowing and so unique. And finally, my favourite thing is the actual production of the book, by this I mean, there are different fonts within the book and sometimes there are whole pages taken up by the one page, and I mean literally every space on that page will be filled with words. It's amazing.

6. Northern Light/The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
Firstly, you don't even want to know how many times I accidentally typed 'campus' instead of 'compass' while writing this post. This is one of the most unique worlds I've read about. I absolutely adore the daemons of this book (I imagine them to be like a physical form of a patronus almost) but they, and the rest of the story, is just so incredibly different.

7. The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney
I know I've talked about this book quite a lot, but I couldn't not mention it for this list. I know that for some people this won't be a unique read, but for me it definitely was. This follows a girl named Alex who is date raped in her junior year at Boarding School and it tells how she is able to move on. So again, I know this won't be unique for some people, but it really was for me.

8. Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
Is it possible for us to make a post and not mention this book? No, not really! This time I'm not here to mention how amazing and hot and perfect Warner is and how much I love him (which is a lot) but I want to mention the writing style. I think this is what really drew me into this book- there is something so unique about Tahereh's writing, it's almost sort of lyrical.

9. More Than This by Patrick Ness
That's right, Patrick Ness is amazing enough to get himself on this list twice. More Than This is completely different to The Knife of Never Letting Go, in fact it's completely different to anything I've ever read. I went into this book expecting a contemporary and I ended up with this- OH MY GOD. I can't even describe what this book is.

10. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brain Selznick
This was the first novel I'd ever read that used pictures in a way that told the story in this particular way. I'm not sure if I'm going to explain this right, but sometimes there would just be pictures without words to go along with it- so the words would tell one thing, and the pictures might show something else. It was amazing.

So that's my list for this week!