The table can't hold everything, so some things get thrown on the floor next to it. These tend to ephemeral, such as magazines I'm in the middle of reading. When I get sleepy I don't want to take the time to mark my place or fold them over neatly and find a space on the table for them, so they get thrown face down on the floor. If I were always tidy they would get picked up the next morning, but they often stay for several days, maybe 3 or 4 half-read magazines or newspapers huddling together to keep warm, wondering about their ultimate fate. Poor things. If I were more attentive to their welfare I would stack them neatly on the coffee table in the living room, thus releasing them from the prospect of months in the limbo of the night table.

I am confronting the truth of what my friend told me, the thing that got me started listing the night table landscape, which is that some books go there and sit for months and are not read. So in the spirit of mid-winter scarcity and creative depression, I am mustering out the following:

Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic (I read enough of it to see that it had to do with the Pope)
A Grief Observed ( I read the first chapter and decided that my grief and his were not exactly comparable)
Orthodoxy (Chesterton's baroque sentences and paragraphs are great if you're in the mood for them. I find I usually am not.)

New additions:
Sun Dancing by Geoffrey Moorehouse: A Christmas gift from celticblues5, it is the history of a medieval Irish monastery.
The Jim Chee Mysteries ( a collection of three of Hillerman's best.)

The cleaning-off is an adjunct to a general cleaning off and out around the house. I have found that some of the things in boxes that were my mother's which were at first so fraught with sentiment and memory that I couldn't imagine getting rid of them are now ready to make their way into the world to become items of sentiment or memory for someone else.

I hope that my readers are enjoying the spareness and scarcity of winter, and letting themselves do what they need to do to endure it.