Heyo Bookaholics!

Have you ever re-read a novel?

I have re-read novels before…

Kinda.

So, my all-time favourite series of books (chronicles?) is the Shadowhunter novels. If you’ve been around long enough, you have seen how I am able to shove them into any post I write (such as this one hehe).

Thankfully I started reading the series just before City of Heavenly Fire was released so I didn’t have that many books to catch up on when I started (RIP to anyone starting this series today). This also means that I have had the ability to see Cassandra Clare’s writing progress and improve over the years.

My Showhunter novels are (for now) contained to one shelf. I will be purchasing another book, hopefully, this week and I have Chain of Gold coming in the mail when it is released 🙂 I am very very excited, I may even do a Shadowhunter’s book collection video on my channel next year!

So I just got off track there, but I hope you’re all unnecessarily caught up because that’s not what this post is about.

The entire start of this post and the reason I’m writing this post is that I cannot, for the life of me, read City of Bones. I thought that because I’ve read it one and a half times already that it would be easy… I was wrong.

Also, I realised that the reason I’ve had trouble making it through CoB and have avoided re-reading books previously is for a few reasons:

I remember the ending. This is a lot of people’s reasons for not re-reading books. This isn’t a huge factor for me, especially for books I haven’t read in so long because my memory may not be correct, or I might’ve forgotten some small details.

Because I know the ending, I make up my own alternative stories while reading (with myself inserted into the timeline of course). This is the main and weirdest reason I’m having difficulty with reading CoB. I don’t talk about this because it’s super strange and I don’t think anyone else does this, but I make up my own alternate story within the timeline but with myself inserted into the story. This means I get to a point in the novel, drift off and stop reading, which really sucks.

For an older novel like City of Bones, the writing style doesn’t match the style of the newer books in the series and feels kind of off. Don’t get me wrong, I love Cassandra Clare’s writing, it’s just that her writing has changed so much over the years that I notice the subtle differences, despite not being able to point them out.

The book I’m re-reading isn’t queer enough. That’s literally it. Novels with queer protagonists have been my preference as of late because they’re so much more wholesome and less generic than a hetero relationship.

That’s pretty much it.

I hope by identifying these issues I am able to get back on track with reading City of Bones and maybe not leave it unfinished because I am not bringing it to Korea with me.