I really shouldn't be allowed near the Guardian review section at a weekend: I ordered five books as a result of that on Saturday

I had to give up on new books after I found my local thrift store stocks used books. If I visit once a week or so I can be guaranteed to find 6 or 7 books I'd like to read. Two of my latest good finds are The Corrections, which I'm currently reading and loving, and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, which I should enjoy. I was going to buy those new a couple of years ago. These are $1.50 for soft cover and $2.25 for hardcover.

If you want to talk about The Corrections and/or Jonathan Franzen, I'm the one, nm. He's on my list of authors I'd willing buy sight unseen. I hope he's working on another book right now.

See? And I found him to be laugh-out-loud funny. nm and I must be on the same wavelength.

what's the word for authors who publish several books a year and who also write under several different pen names?

You wouldn't call him - what's the word for authors who publish several books a year and who also write under several different pen names? He's not a fast writer.

GEORGES SIMENON (b. 1903) 500 + books
The name may not be that familiar but having published 200 books under his own name and another 300 under a collection of other names he deserves his place on the list. It is from his most famous literary creation that he is best known, Inspector Maigret.

You wouldn't call him - what's the word for authors who publish several books a year and who also write under several different pen names? He's not a fast writer.

There're also some really good writers who write that fast.

Throughout a single day in 1892, John Shawnessy recalls the great moments of his life - from the battles of the Civil War to the politics of the Gilded Age, from the love affairs of his youth in Indiana to his homecoming as schoolteacher, husband, and father.

Shawnessy is the epitome of the place and period in which he lives, a rural land of springlike women, shady gamblers, wandering vagabonds, and soapbox orators. Yet here on the banks of the Shawmucky River, which weaves its primitive course through Raintree County, Indiana, he also feels and obeys ancient rhythms.

A number-one best seller when it was first published in 1948, this powerful novel is a compelling vision of 19th-century America with timeless resonance.


©1948 Ross Lockridge, Jr.; (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Train doesn't know the earth it passes over.
Ross Lockridge, Jr.,
Raintree County, pp. 232-3.

Train doesn't know the earth it passes over. Train thunders daily down the stretch behind the Old Home Place. Train is a tumult passing. Hoarse voice of train wails in the valley of Danwebster.
Sleepers in the earth, do you hear the train passing? Do you any longer hear the sound of its diurnal course, beloved sleepers in the earth of Raintree County?
Listen to the voice of train. The way for it is straight and far across the land. It rushes far and fast across the Nation, passing westward, passing through Raintree County.
(O, blithe days, o, early agrarian days on the breast of the land! O, Eden of bland repose!)
Listen! There is a voice of thunder on the land. It is the voice of years and fates, crying at intersections; it is the bullhead beast, who runs on a Cretan maze of iron roads and chases the naked sacrifices hither and thither. The bullgod comes up fast out of the east, under the churning of his round rear haunches. Smell of a blackened ash, odor of hot metal, the frictioning iron parts, blows across the earth of memories.
(O, sweet young days of the aching but unripped seedpurse. O, tall endeavors. O, innocent, fragrant time.)
Listen! What voice is calling now, voice of the grooved wheels on the roads of the hurrying days! It is the thunder of the big events. They are coming, full of malice and arrogance, they are coming on hooves of iron, wounding the earth of Raintree County. They will travel straight and far, through the light barriers of the corngold days. Lo! they will drive the young gods, the beautiful young gods, from the river's reedy marge.
The day becomes brighter and hotter. In court house squares, the streets of the Nation, the people gather. The train bears its streamer of black smoke, a banner of progress fast and far across the land. Lo! we must keep our appointments. The clock on the Court House Tower is telling the time of day. We have a rendezvous in a train station, there where the thundering express stops a moment in the bright day and lets down out of its smoky womb a procession of remembered faces.
Listen! great voice of thunder and urgency, voice of titan yesterdays and of still more titanic tomorrows! Do you still bring me tidings, have you still a bundle of headlines to throw down for me, will the face of the most beautiful of women look unexpectedly from a window of the trembling coaches for me? Or do you bring again, as so often before, a somber freight for me, who hearken the voice of your passing here on the breast of the land?
He walked back through the tangled grass of the Danwebster Graveyard, trying not to step on graves.

I'm having a sci-fi phase. I read Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space in a week (remarkable for me, given that it's over 500 pages) and am now well into Iain M Banks's The Use of Weapons.

I really shouldn't be allowed near the Guardian review section at a weekend: I ordered five books as a result of that on Saturday – Two Serious Ladies: A Novel by Jane Bowles, which sounds really quirky; What If Latin America Ruled the World? How the South Will Take the North into the 22nd Century by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera; The Black Lung Captain: Tales of the Ketty Jay by Chris Wooding, The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett and The Punishment of Gaza by Gideon Levy.

I'm going to a colleague's book launch tomorrow evening, so I'll pick up his book – although I don't think I'll cart it France – but I know that the bookshop it's taking place at also has Philip Kerr's first three Berlin police procedurals in a single volume, so I may pick that up too...

... and, because people keep telling me I must, Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo yesterday – super; really enjoyed it –