The Guardian posted a rather grouchy column by Colin Robinson, “Writers should take a year off, and give us all a break,” illustrated by a photo of an older John Updike in backswing, looking at the flight of his drive.

“What if everyone stopped scribbling for a year? Will Self could pull on his hiking boots, Martin Amis could sharpen his tennis serve, and we could catch up on our reading,” Robinson writes. Apparently the glut of established writers is made even more pressing by a statistic he quotes:  that according the The New York Times, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them.