Top Ten Reasons I Love Reading These Subgenres

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

Bear with me. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've tweaked the topic, but when I read the topic for this week, this idea got in my head and wouldn't turn loose. Instead of being ten reasons I'm a fan of something, this is ten topics/subgenres I'm a fan of. Which I guess could be considered Top Ten Reasons I Love Reading (or something like that).



#1 Fantasy Archeology
This really isn't a big subgenre, but given the fact that it takes my favorite genre and crosses it with my dream job? Of course I love it! To me there is just something so fascinating about seeing a culture that just like us - curious about what came before them. And, because it's fantasy, the sky's pretty much the limit when it comes to what they can discover. Can I just say, too, that it also takes an incredible amount of worldbuilding!


#2 Fantasy Romance
I mean, it had to happen. You take a girl that's loved fantasy books since she was a teen, add in someone that can never seem to fully appreciate a contemporary romance and...yup. This. I think what it comes down to is how much I like the 'opposites attract' idea, and it seems that nowhere is is more obvious than in a fantasy where the love interests can be different races. You can have humans and elves falling in love! (Love Red Rope of Fate by K.M. Shea!) And humans and...well... Read Radiance by Grace Draven because, seriously, that's about as 'opposites' as you can get. And, I've discovered over the years that there's a not-so-small part of me that wants to fall in love with a sexy sorcerer.


#3 MagiTech
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur Clark
I love it when they take magic and technology and kind of slam them together. Do they work well together, or do they clash? Or are they the same thing? Can you imagine what people five hundred years ago would have thought about the technology we have today? So, is it magic - or is it magic because we don't understand it? Also, can true magic and technology ever truly exist peacefully together. (And why would we want it to?)


#4 Clockpunk
I've recently gotten super interested in clockpunk. It's kind of like steampunk, but instead of steam power, everything runs on gears. Because I'll always love steampunk, some of my favorite types of stories meld the two.


#5 Fantasy Steampunk
Steampunk is an ever growing genre - and I love it! But for me, things get just a bit better when the steam starts running in a world that doesn't resemble ours at all. Like in the Tales of the Ketty Jay series by Chris Wooding. This is a fantasy world with steampunk and I love it so much. (Victorian steampunk is cool too, but my heart is here.)


#6 Superheroes - or Supervillains
Marvel what have you done to me? While I definitely am more curious about the villains, I'm immediately interested in pretty much any story that features this. I love the idea of an alter ego and, preferably, a team working together and people with special abilities and a look at the difference between heroes and villains.


#7 ESPers
If I see that word, or allusions to it in any book synopsis, it has my immediate attention. While it's kind of related to the above, it's also different in that I prefer these type of books to focus more on the difference between those that have ESP and those that don't. Added points if there are shadowy government organizations that are either very, very evil or very, very good - you're just never quite sure. And even more points if the ESPers didn't come by their abilities naturally.

#8 Dinosaurs
Another word that immediately catches my attention. (Thank you, Jurassic Park.) While I don't mind terribly if the dinosaurs are just the skeletons or if they're going to come to life, this is one word that NEEDS to be in more synopsis'.

#9 Egypt
Love the idea of Egypt bases fantasy, a look at their deities, historical fantasy with Egyptian based magic, reincarnation, a journey through the Egyptian underworld. Pretty much anything Egyptian that isn't going to be quite normal. (And with the proper research!)


#10 Assassins in Fantasy
What does it say about me that some of my favorite characters in fantasy books are assassins? But I'm not at all interested in ones from anything even remotely resembling real life. (Of course, I do think that's the difference between knives and magic and crossbows and...guns. Urgh.) But I don't like those 'I don't want to do this! Why do I have to kill people?' assassins. Give me the ones that take pride in their work - hopefully without enjoying it a little too much. Like the assassins from the Assassins Guild in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, now that I think of it.


And, that's a wrap. This was soo much fun to do and I hope you guys enjoyed it. What subgenres or topics do you like reading?