Monthly Archives: July 2013

Updike places high on EW’s Top 100 Books list

Posted on by
Reply

Screen Shot 2013-07-07 at 7.40.20 PMIf you open up the July 5/12 2013 Special Double Issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine and go to page 96, you’ll see that Updike’s Rabbit quartet was named the  #8 novel of all time.

“‘Rabbit’ Angstrom runs from marriage and responsibility and runs smack into them again in Updike’s masterful chronicle of a man’s four-decade race against the American zeitgeist,” the editors write.

Only F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather placed higher among American writers, with The Great Gatsby earning 2nd place and My Antonia 6th.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved came in at Number 9, right behind Updike, followed by E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (#10—children’s books, popular books, genre books, and international authors were all considered), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (#12), Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (#13), E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (#15), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (#17), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (#18), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (#19), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (#20), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (#21), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (#26), Richard Wright’s Native Son (#30), J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (#32), John Irving’s The World According to Garp (#34), Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (#36), and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (#37).

Screen Shot 2013-07-07 at 7.27.59 PMMorrison was the only American writer to place twice, with Song of Solomon coming in at #52. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple made the list at #45, as did Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (#62), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (#63), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (#64), Saul Bellow’s Herzog (#65), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (#85). Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club barely made the list at 100.

The article, which runs from pages 94-103, generated so many reader complaints that the editors felt compelled to defend their selection process (click here). Topping the list? Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. That Updike is so well thought of by the staff of an entertainment magazine speaks to both the literary merit of the Rabbit novels and their popular appeal.

Belated: 2009 tributes are worth reading, rereading

Posted on by
Reply

Sometimes it takes a while for things to rise to the top in that massive cache of Internet offerings, as happened with two 2009 tributes to John Updike—one written by Michael Dirda for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the other posted by “an Indian fan.”

“John Updike, 1932-2009”
Dirda’s tribute, posted on February 13, 2009, includes some interesting observations. “Updike recognized that American literature and American art often occupy a realm between fantasy and reality, that they rely on mystery and symbolism as much as on apt observation, that our greatest novelists and painters are constantly edging into the magical and dreamlike,” Dirda writes, concluding, “Updike’s own fiction feels grounded in archetypes, touched with romance and myth.” Here’s the link to the full essay.

“An Indian fan of American writer John Updike”
Journalist Shevlin Sebastian, who has worked for magazines and newspapers in Kolkata, Kochi, and Mumbai and now writes for the New Indian Express in Kochi, posted his Updike tribute on February 4, 2009. “At the American Centre library in Kolkata, where I was a regular visitor, there would always be a row of Updike books,” Sebastian writes. He expresses one “enduring regret”—that Updike’s death removed him from consideration for the Nobel Prize. Here is a link to the full post.

Blogger notes “A Child’s Calendar” revisions

Posted on by
Reply

updikechildscalendar1Scholars haven’t done much with Updike’s children’s books, but blogger Maria Popova (“Brain Pickings”) notes that Updike’s A Child’s Calendar, originally published in 1965, was updated for a 1999 re-release to be more racially inclusive.

Trina Schart Hyman’s illustrations feature mixed ethnicities that were absent from the original book. Popova observes that Updike even made slight changes to the text in order to “celebrate diversity,” and cites examples.

Here’s the article—“A Child’s Calendar: John Updike’s Vintage Children’s Book, Updated to Celebrate Diversity”—with poems and illustrations.