Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Book Mashups I'd Love to See

I've got to be honest, as a child of the early '00s Disney Channel Renaissance, I couldn't help but get excited when I saw today's Top Ten Tuesday theme. I mean, mashups were the jam when I was a kid: from That's So Suite Life with Hannah Montana (which was a confluence of the three unstoppable powers that be at that time period, That's So Raven, Suite Life with Zach and Cody, and, naturally, Hannah Montana), to Nickolodeon's repeat Jimmy Neutron and Fairly Oddparents episodes, I've been practically raised on the phenomena of favorite characters invading each others' spaces.

But when it comes to mashing up books, things can get a little sticky. Sure, you can have favorites swap places, or interact with other casts, but what about when it's the settings of the books you want to intertwine? What if it's the ambience or just general theming?

Needless to say, this topic ended up being a little harder than I originally thought. Here's what I came up with:

1. Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame + The Brothers Grimms' Rapunzel
Okay, broader connections between the two include a focus on an innocent youth trapped in a tower, and an overbearing, antagonistic force keeping them there. So, imagine: a young woman (or man) unknowingly woos a prince to the church based on the power of her (or his) voice, but she (or he) has to stay hidden, and is burdened with the knowledge that the two of them could never be together...

2. The Amazing Bronte Power Hour - aka, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre Meets Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Meets Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Interactions between the Bronte sisters have been touched on before - perhaps most memorably by Hark! A Vagrant comic artist Kate Beaton - but what about their characters? Jane would have no patience for Catherine but would probably love Helen Graham, and Rochester would only goad Heathcliff into grander hysterics for the sheer drama of it all...

3. Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs + Julie Powell's Julie & Julia 
Hear me out, here: two famous stories involving a pretty significant attention to procedural eating. So, what if Julie wasn't cooking her way through Julia Childs' cookbook, but instead, the human anatomy?

4. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein + Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia
As a huge Frankenstein fan, I've been perpetually disappointed in how our monster has been portrayed throughout film history. He was never a mumbling, grunting mess, but instead, quickly picked up language from observing human interaction. Here's the thing though: what if, after so rapidly absorbing that information, the semantics and specifics got lost in translation? What might transpire are some classically disastrous Amelia Bedelia-like miscommunications... but with horrifying results.

5. Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer + Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes
There is no literary character as amply gifted as Tom Sawyer, when it comes to master manipulation. Then again, there's no literary character quite as accustomed to weeding out the truth than Sherlock Holmes. Is this my way of asking for recompense for the movie bomb that was League of Extraordinary Gentleman? Kind of.

6. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island + Frank Herbert's Dune
Just to be very clear, I grew up as not only a fan of Treasure Island, as well as science fiction, but also the blend of the two of them together, a la one of my favorite Disney movies, Treasure Planet. What better place to send the likes of Long John Silver to dig for buried treasure, than the politically turbulent, giant-worm-infested, desperately sandy desert planet of Arrakis?

7. Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain + Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (+ maybe a little Gary Paulsen's Hatchet in the mix, as well?) 
Basically what I'm saying is, I would love a children's classic about a boy living amongst the animals in a climate more similar to my own... though being that Mountain is set in the Catskills of New York, then maybe leaning more towards Paulsen's central Canada location for Hatchet?

8. Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden + Stephanie Perkins' Lola and the Boy Next Door
I've actually talked about this in my Top Ten Tuesday before, but I'd love to take the time to write a contemporary YA romance retelling of The Secret Garden, which is one of my favorite books from childhood. Maybe I'll make it my NaNo writing challenge for this year?

9. Stephanie Meyers's Twilight + Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink's Welcome to Night Vale 
I just really love the idea of the absolute insane emotional dynamics and unstable personalities of YA paranormal romances, propped up against the bleakly observational and objective reporting from Welcome to Nightvale. "Hello, listeners. Local reports say that the forestry fallout from last week's thunderstorm was instead, the resulting noise from a rowdy game of undead vampire baseball..."

10. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice + pretty much anything
Let me make this abundantly clear: I will read whatever - and I truly mean whatever - Pride and Prejudice retelling you could ever throw at me. We've already had Lizzie and Darcy meets zombies, Bollywood, and web vlogging, and I've pretty much loved all of them, so really, I'm game for anything.

What's in your Top Ten? Let me know, in the comments below!