December 2, 2012

  • Week 49: City of Bones

    So lately, because of the hype about the upcoming movie, there has been an explosion of edits/gifs/quotations from Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones on my Tumblr dashboard. So I finally got off my lazy butt and located a copy of the book. There's one blog that I follow in particular which has recommended several books in the past which I have read and enjoyed: Angelfall, Delirium, The Fault in Our Stars.

    City of Bones is the first in a series, of which the Tumblr-rec actually told me through PM that they couldn't really get into until the second or third book. But I did enjoy book 1 and had the foresight to locate a copy of the other books in the series before starting. (I hate waiting for the next book when I get into a series's story.)

    The weirdest thing about it is that even though none of the story felt particularly familiar, when I got to the major plot twist, that seemed familiar. I wonder if I read a clip of the story somewhere else? But who would go around posting just the plot twist to the public? Seems like a jerk move. But that section seemed...so familiar.

    Anyway, one annoying thing about reading City of Bones is that with all the movie stuff I couldn't get certain faces out of my mind. And so I just read the whole thing with the shadow of a movie looming overhead. Clary was Lily Collins of course, but oddly Hodge was the new Dumbledore in my mind (just re-watched Half-Blood Prince recently), and Luke was Alaric from "The Vampire Diaries" (weirdly, there was another character in the book named Alaric, who was connected with Luke, so that just strengthened the image). I think I had an actor in mind for Simon too but his face has faded, so oh well.

    More generally, City of Bones sits partway between Angelfall and "The Dresden Files." It has a lot of magical/myth-y stuff, and the premise is that "all the myths are true." And then the main band of characters are demonhunters (Shadowhunters is what they call themselves). Only Clare has mixed in the myth of nephilim as well, which is what reminded me of Angelfall.