Sunday on my way to somewhere else I went into a small used bookstore because I was suddenly struck by the desire to read something completely absorbing, something escapist but not stupid. I roamed around, the long list of things I mean to read failing to appear in my head. I wound up at the Ps, with a copy of The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell, and Blue Angel by Francine Prose.

I’ve been working my way through a collection of Powell’s early novels, the ones set in small towns in Ohio lit up by characters ambitious and lonely in the backwater. I’m not in the mood for that - I’m in the mood for one of her later novels, set in New York and filled with characters from small towns in Ohio, ambitious and lonely while surrounded by people just like themselves. But rather than re-read The Locusts Have No King for the seventh or eighth time (it’s that good - go read it), I bought The Golden Spur.

I haven’t started it yet, though - I got hooked on page one of Blue Angel and have put it down only reluctantly since then. This is the first novel by Prose that I’ve read; I read the short story collection The Peaceable Kingdom, and I remember the time spent reading it going by pleasantly enough, but two years later I can’t come up with a single detail about any of the stories. The same probably won’t be true of Blue Angel, which already seems to have lodged deep into the more retentive parts of my brain.