Top Ten Tuesday #11 - Topics I Love Reading About

Top Ten Tuesday is a Meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish where I will be picking from their top tens and attempting to reveal what my thinking is behind these choices.

Topics I Love Reading About:

1. Time Travel
Time Travel has so much potential. You can add to events that have already happened or invent a futuristic world, you can change events and affect timelines, you can give accounts of prehistory and you can make it completely silly if you want to. Characters have so many fascinating moral questions to ask themselves when it comes to this topic, and there can be so many loyalties and ties. A huge topic that never gets old.

2. Hidden Worlds
There are so many books out there with hidden worlds in, and yes, mostly they're supernatural or paranormal in origin, and I love that. Neverwhere, The City's Son, Mortal Instruments, Rivers of London, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Ingo.. the list never ends. There are so many ideas and so much inspiration, I don't think I'll run out of reading for this topic, either.

3. Supernatural Powers
Throw me a book with someone who has weird powers, or with someone who discovers a paranormal creature and I will guzzle it down. Every Other Day, Runemarks, The Body Finder, Impostor, Some Quiet Place, Between the Lives; these are all examples of this idea being worked to very different effects. Some of these I haven't read yet. and I really can't wait!

4. A Spin on a Classic
Recently I've fallen out of love with Fairytale spins and now I want something a bit different; I want classic tale spins. I've seen a few about Peter Pan, such as Alias Hook and Tiger Lily, and a couple of Oliver Twist; Dodger, The Artful and Olivia Twisted being a couple of examples. Broom with a View caught me by surprise, being a witchy retelling of Room With a View. I can't wait to get started on Splintered by A.G Howard for her take on Alice in Wonderland. I wonder how many more takes on a classic I can find!

5. Strong Female Characters
Simply the idea of a kick-ass heroine is my cup of tea. Think Lyra from His Dark Materials, Celaena from Throne of Glass, Vin from the Mistborn series or Arya from Game of Thrones; these are the kind of girls I like to see.

6. Assassins and Murders
Speaking of Throne of Glass, and Game of Thrones, I love a bit of action and violence. I even like a bit of blood, as long as it doesn't make me gag while I'm reading it. I find it really easy to write as well, but enough of that. Assassins and Murder make for a really interesting book, full of important moral questions and difficult decisions for characters. It's tough for me not to like a book that runs deeper through the human nature. Another good series to read would be His Fair Assassin as well, that also has a bit of religion thrown in for good measure.

7. Steampunk
Every steampunk-style book I've read so far has been great! I love the Victorian era and the addition of creepy cogs and steam power. But I love it even more when someone takes the genre and twists it further to combine with another one. Take The Infernal Devices, for example. This is primarily a sort of supernatural style book, but add in a few creepy machines and a Victorian setting, and you get something quite different to Cassandra Clare's other series, The Mortal Instruments. Or The Silver Sickle, where the steampunk leanings really add something special to the sci-fi setting.

8. Dystopian Settings
I'm a sucker for dystopia. I love the classics like 1984 and Brave New World, but some of the YA dystopian fiction is pure genius. Among my favourites are The Hunger Games, The Selection, Maze Runner, Wither and The Handmaid's Tale. I find it so interesting that so many people have ideas about who the world could be. So many thought What If..? and came up with answers that many people couldn't dream of. I love the fact that the dystopian genre is a way of getting concerns out in the open. Take Breathe, for example, the question asked is: What if we got rid of all the trees? Lo and behold, the world left behind is imperfect and imbalanced, with a minuscule population forced to live in huge bubbles because without them they would die in the earth's atmosphere. It really makes you stop and think about the big issues.

9. Fantasy Creatures
So Vampires and Zombies are off the cards for now, but I'm not bored of witches yet, or trolls, or goblins, or banshees, or fairies (yet, my limit is coming up soon), or even ghosts. I'd just like to see something original and a bit strange, which is why I find The Soul Screamers series, the Trylle Series and  Stolen Songbird so intriguing. There's something great about the lesser known paranormal entities coming to the fore.

10. Fairytale Elements
I may have lied slightly about being sick of fairy tales. I am not completely, but now I find myself being pickier. I prefer having elements rather than a whole retelling, I prefer mixed genres like in The Lunar Chronicles, sometimes I like it to be firmly grounded in reality like Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and I prefer something stupendously unexpected happening.

Bonus!
11. Hyped to Must-Read Status
If a book has been hyped at me so much every single person seems to have read it but me, the chances are, I will give it a go out of pure curiosity. I love to try out new things, so even if it's not within my usual boundaries, I decide it might be worth the risk. Recommendations made to me nearly always get a chance. For example; I had no intention to read Anna and the French Kiss, but since a Goodreads friend recommended it to me, I've decided to give it a go.

Which kind of books do you love to read about?

Kyra_x

Throne of Glass - Sarah J. Maas

Celaena Sardothien is Ardalan's most infamous and feared assassin. She has spent the last year in the salt mines of Endovier after being betrayed and captured; a death sentence to most, but she has miraculously survived. Now the crown prince has dragged her out of one hell and into another; a competition to become the hated King's champion (a kinder word for his personal assassin) and eventually win her freedom. However, the palace, the prince and her captor (the moody captain of the guard) are not as they first appear. Instead, she has something new to worry about; something evil is lurking n the palace, ripping competitors apart in the night. Celaena has to act before she becomes the next corpse.

Told in third person, from the viewpoints of Celaena, Dorian (the Prince) and Chaol (the Guard), Throne of Glass throws you straight into the story, at the moment where Celaena is being freed from her prison. We are intrigued from the start as there are already questions that need answering; How did she get there in the first place? Who betrayed her? How did she end up as an assassin? The plot carries you along at a steady speed throughout; nothing happens too fast or too slowly and everything is there for a reason. Unfortunately, the twists are very easy to see coming and it would have benefited the author not to sow quite as many seeds as to the plot of the second book.

Our protagonist is a strange character; she seems at odds with herself most of the time.. her assassin training giving way to a much more materialistic and silly girl. Despite that, she is quite likeable, funny and easy to empathise with even though she is a killer. The main worry here is that she actually doesn't seem like an assassin - there is one killing in the entire book and although her fighting is well described, her thoughts and actions are much too normal. The emphasis of the book actually divides its-self a bit too evenly between her relationships with other people and her adventures, fighting and planning.

This doesn't make the book any less entertaining, though. In fact, it only makes you like her more as you discover she isn't as heartless and cold as you think. It seems that most appearances are deceiving in this book, as many prejudices about characters turn out to be wrong, including your own.

The most interesting part for me was the competition; the sizing up of competitors, their alliances and the tests they undergo. I would have liked to see a lot more of this as some of the tests were just skipped over in favour of developing the love triangle. As brilliant and human the depictions of each relationship was, I could have done with a bit more action.

The story carries on in Crown of Midnight, and it has four prequels attached to give background information, which unfortunately I have not read; The Assassin and the Pirate Lord, The Assassin and the Desert, The Assassin and the Underworld, The Assassin and the Empire. The story has a lot of plot points that are unexplained, and I am sure these novellas go a long way towards covering what is references in the book. Looking to the future, there are very clear plot-lines to develop, and I hope to read about political warfare, actual warfare, lots of assassinations and a few difficult decisions for our antihero.

I read this very quickly as was always yearning to read more. Gripping and interesting, but the main character was lacking ferocity.

8 out of 10

Beautiful cover image taken from infinity-of-time.blogspot