10% First Impressions: A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

I borrowed this book sometime in October I believe, and not meaning to but what ended up being a surprise boon, I renewed it so it's due early December. And that's just another thing deadlines are great for, motivation. I'd started reading my first 10% of the book more than a week ago but that effort got stalled. The pages ended up being dense than I anticipated and as paperbacks often are, the book was longer than I imagined. I think I read about the first 20 pages in this (about) 580 page tome, about a third through my first tenth, and I was not feeling motivated.

Assuming proper recollection, I saw the trailer for the TV series on Instagram one day. I wasn't going to watch it because it was going to be on some cable channel (Sundance?) I don't have. There was the option of doing a free trial, but now that there's a second season it would have to be when I can binge through the entirety of the show. Also, apparently maybe it's free on the AMC website? Of course the clip hinted at an eventual romance, but I didn't realize the book was going to be a supernatural romance. I should have because generally speaking (for some reason) anything with vampires in it has to relate them in an erotic sense. I really just borrowed it once I saw it on the library bookshelf. I think other people were also drawn in by the trailer because around the same time I'd first peeped it I'd also seen on Twitter that the book was better so I was interested in at some point reading the book. Also funny is that for a book called "A Discovery of Witches," the supernatural aspects are not something we as readers have to trudge through discovering. Existing non-human, magic or supernatural beings just are. Maybe we're introduced to them, but we're not jumping in, "discovering" a world of magic. Is discovery here supposed to mean like a gaggle of witches?

As I said, maybe about the first third of my first tenth wasn't grabbing me. But then I went to the local laundromat and took this book along with me. And so my reading began and my involvement in the story was cemented. The romance build-up continues to be overtly obvious and the reading was as dry as I imagine the in-story library being. Fortunately the plot picked up and continues to thicken. There's some hidden mysteries of ancient and immense value? What will be uncovered in the next 500+ pages? What will be laid bare that this is a trilogy? I can't really say what started appealing to me, because it does feel a bit obvious where we're going. The vampire who's maybe a bit misogynistic and the reluctant witch have a reluctant enemy to friends to lovers romance as she discovers and embraces the part of herself she's been denying, unearthing supernatural secrets that may or may not relate to her parents' would-be accidental death? Is that it? I'm gonna keep reading, and am probably, at least at this point, much more likely to continue to series than say the Shades of Magic series.