Wednesday Wishlist #11

This week's wishlist is very much to do with death. I don't have a weird obsession with it, but for some reason strange deathly powers and zombies are a really cool thing to read about for me:

The Body Finder - Kimberley Derting
A girl who has the power to sense dead bodies and find the creature that killed them. A serial killer ravaging the town she lives in. She may be the only one who can find them. Ohhh, this sounds good!

The Body Finder on Goodreads

Shatter Me/ Unravel Me/ Ignite Me - Tahereh Mafi
Dystopian world? Check. Strange power? Check. Love? Check. Action? Check. Sounds good to me! But it's not just all that, it's the power I love the idea of; the idea of being able to kill someone with just one touch puts me in mind of Rogue from X-Men, but hopefully that's where the resemblance to that franchise stops. We shall have to wait and see!

Shatter Me on Goodreads

My Soul to Take (Soul Screamers Series) - Rachel Vincent
A girl who knows when people are about to die, who can't help but scream when they do. Banshees are an amazing idea to write about, and there aren't many books out there that deal with this creepy paranormal creature. I love the premise, so I really hope this series is good! There are tons of these books, so it should keep me busy for a while.

My Soul to Take on Goodreads

Revived - Cat Patrick
A story about a girl who has died and been revived several times by means of a Government Drug Testing Programme. I'd love to see how the author handles the idea of death and rebirth in this one. Sounds like a good almost-dystopia with a real focus on identity and death.

Revived on Goodreads

Kyra_x

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

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Six intertwined lives, spread out across time, and yet they are all linked through one common theme; mans' hunger for power and their ability to fight back against it. It can be as simple as an escape from a nursing home or as huge as the uncovering of a bloody conspiracy.

The book is split into eleven parts and goes chronologically until it reaches the far future, where it turns back on its-self to complete each of the stories. In terms of suspense and intrigue, this is a really good idea, especially when the author leaves their characters on a life-or-death cliffhanger, such as in The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing and Half-Lives. However, it does take some time to remember what has happened in the previous narratives when you arrive back at them further into the book. Some of them are even cut off in the middle of a sentence (such as Adam Ewing's Journal), which means you may have to turn back to the previous pages (all the way at the beginning of the book) to see the first part and makes sense of it.

Despite this issue, the book is a very good read (and so it should be; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). Each storyline is meticulously thought out and researched, especially in the case of the Journal, where there is a fair amount about the resident tribes of the Chatham Islands (being somewhere around New Zealand and Australia). Each voice is extremely different, and there is no mistaking any of the characters for each-other. Perhaps the most different of all is Zachry, a Valleysman living in a post-apocalyptic earth, whose dialect is very difficult to read. For example; "All three of 'em cackled like a danglin' o' screechbats an' I redded diresome'n'steamin'." It takes a little bit of time for you to get used to this dialect, but as the whole story comes as one chapter, it is a little bit easier to take in than if it had been split apart.

I particularly liked reading An Orison of Sonmi~451 and Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After as I love the idea of what the world could be like years into the future. They paint pictures of world's that are quite different from our own, and yet we can see that they are fairly possible, given the right conditions.

Compared top the film though, the stories seemed to lack the direct links that were laid out. In the book, each main character is meant to be a reincarnation of the previous one, but in the film, there are several reincarnations of several characters, adding depth and interest to the story. Sonmi's Orison clearly explains the concept of souls crossing the ages in the film, where the book gives a few vague references with no solid points for comparison in all of the stories. I found that the film also added in a lot more action and got into the main point in the story a lot sooner. This is particularly evident in Sonmi's Orison, where she spends a lot of time on her own. The film cuts this part out entirely in favour of a more full-on narrative.

The book leaves it up to us to interpret how each story is linked, and some people may find this aggravating. The idea is much more about people and their will as opposed to the reincarnation idea that flows through the film. Cloud Atlas is a long and fairly difficult read, and it is not for everyone's taste, but please give it a go. It is sure to inspire you.

8 out of 10

PS: I saw this for £2.00 in my local charity shop, it was a bargain!