Top Ten Tuesday: Unique Books

Happy Top Ten Tuesday! Today's topic is the top ten unique books, and sadly, I could only think of five. Forgive me. 

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme started on the Broke and the Bookish blog.

They set the topic, we make the lists. Visit their site to see more on this topic

Excerpt from The Arrival

The City of Dreaming Books immediately came to my mind when I got this topic. The main character is a dinosaur named Optimus Yarnspinner who comes into possession of a mysterious short story and, in an attempt to uncover the author’s identity, finds himself in Bookholm (the City of Dreaming Books). His search takes him deep underground into the city’s catacombs where he faces terrible monsters and violent Bookhunters.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a graphic novel without words. Not totally unique, but the protagonist is a man immigrating to a new planet. Tan captures the sense of displacement immigrants face when forced to face a place where they are unfamiliar with the language and customs.

Einstein’s Dreams is a series of metaphysical stories supposedly dreamed by Albert Einstein during 1905 while he worked in a patent office. One of my favorites deals with a place where time stands still – it’s a place inhabited by lovers and people who don’t want to see their children grow up.

While best known for Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen has also written a few novels. One of which is the uniquely plotted Asa, as I Knew Him. Even though Dinah and Asa are ending their affair, Dinah still hopes to find depth in the man she loves. So she invents his past and tells the story of his adolescence. As a reader, you have to accept that the book is both fiction in the general sense of it being a novel and also “fake” within the context of the story.

Beautiful Darkness has all the trappings of a lovely, illustrated fairy tale except for the graphic murder in the first few pages. The simplest way to describe it would be “what if The Borrowers were mean to each other?” A group of tiny, human-like creatures are forced to survive in the forest but most of them die either from violence from their companions or their own carelessness.

What do you think? What book have you read that is super original?

~Meredith T.