CloudMass of Sleet

Still feeling recalcitrant about posting, even though there's nothing amiss as such. I just don't feel like doing anything I've told myself I'm supposed to do. I woke up early enough to scurry around a little bit before it was time to meet Madame at the bookstore cafe. I've changed the Christmas holly tablecloth to one that is more Christmas-adjacent. That is, it still has pine branches and red roses, but on a white background. The potted cyclamen are still blooming, so I put them back in the center of the table to be admired. At one point during our chat, Madame exclaimed with relish, "Oh, this is so much fun!" It makes me a bit anxious, because I don't really know how long I can be amusing. But I guess even if familiarity leads to boredom, I will still be more interesting than sitting around the house with no one to talk to. We had agreed to trade books, and did--I gave her The Awakening by Nora Roberts (not at all the same as the one by Kate Chopin), and she gave me Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult. This novel was billed as "a deeply moving novel about the resilience of the human spirit." Uh oh. I never like that kind of blurb. It always means something rotten is going to happen to the protagonist, and probably it will have some kind of lesson to be learned from suffering. No thank you. This is too much of an investment for me right now. However, I will read it as a courtesy to Madame, so we can talk about it later. She made me promise not to skip to the end, which otherwise I would almost certainly have done!

But first I want to finish re-reading The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness. We're watching season 3 of "The Discovery of Witches," and it diverges from the book farther than the previous seasons, so I wanted to remind myself of all the parts that were left out. It's about the resilience of the human spirit, too, but with witches and vampires!