again with the attention span

Here's my problem with books.  The quality of all books is relative to the other books I am reading at the time.  And I might not be that discriminating, I'm not sure yet.  Where do I get that tested, anyway?

I've discovered this awesome service provided by my county's library system, where you can log into their system using the barcode on your library card, and command the library to bring you books!
Bring me all the Neil Gaiman you have!  Immediately, naves!
Ok. Not quite so imperiously.  But you can just click on the titles you want reserved, and they'll have them set aside for you when you go in.  There's another feature that I've more recently stumbled upon where you can keep a list of books you want later, so you don't have to take home 27, and end up renewing them over and over.  which you can also do from the website.  Heaven.

I still bring home six at a time, and start most of them right away.  So if one is really lame, I just leave it on an end table somewhere and focus on the juvenile fiction book I got, ostensibly to read to Hannah, but of which she'll have no part because there's too much suspense.  Or too many monsters.  I like fairy tales.

I checked out The Illumination last time.  It seemed a quiet, thoughtful book about a woman who injures herself with a knife, and meets another woman, fatally wounded in a car accident, while they share a hospital room.  On the date the first woman is injured, for some reason, people all over the world start emitting light from wounds and painful places on their bodies, hence the title. It turns out, I think, that the book is about an inanimate object that passes amongst many different people with little or no clear connection prior to the object passing between them. I got halfway through the book before I decided I didn't care what else happened to the object or the people who had possession of it, and I had finally dispaired that anyone was going to tell me why people were glowing.  I much preferred to spend my spare moments reading a children's novel called Fablehaven.  Really, how could you compete with a story about how a little girl calls up an army of 6-foot faries to rescue her family from a demon.  That's just quality story telling.  I have the attention span and literary sensibilites of a 9 year old.

Except where Neil Gaiman is concerned.  Seriously.  I'd read that guy's grocery list.