Mission Impossible Update

Mission Impossible is getting still more impossible every minute! I had some books reserved at the library and chose to pick them up at my childhood library which, coincidentally, is about a 25 minute walk from where I now live. I hadn't been there in probably 30 years and was almost giddy with the anticipation of going back. It was such a let down! The place is piled up with yet-to-be-shelved books - carts and carts of them. They've replaced the tall wooden shelves they had with more contemporary metal ones and dropped the ceiling. It made the place look more like a supermarket than a library. The check-out librarian was a sullen teenager. The children's section used to occupy an entire floor, now it's a corner of the ground floor, shared with the adult's books. Boo-hoo.

I did pick up my copies of The Last Town on Earth and The Stolen Child, I found a copy of Garth Nix's Lirael, which was supposed to arrive in my recent shipment from Alibris, but that seems to be coming by pony express. I also picked up two Peter Abrahams thrillers. He's good as far as suspense is concerned and he often weaves psychological or neurological threads into his plots, which I enjoy. I also thought they would be good replacement books for my count-down marathon in case Abhorsen doesn't arrive before the New Year or if one of the books I've chosen is proving too long to finish. One or two of them are over 400 pages long and The Balkan Trilogy, which I'm loving, is 900 fricken-fracken pages long. My own fault, I know.