The Telegraph in September (how did we miss that?) posted “100 novels everyone should read; the best novels of all time from Tolkien to Proust and Middlemarch,” and Updike made the list:

43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.

Updike contemporary Ian McEwan made the list (#30, Atonement), as did Muriel Spark (#48, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Toni Morrison (#50, Beloved), Don DeLillo (#51, Underworld), JD Salinger (#52, The Catcher in the Rye), Margaret Atwood (#53, The Handmaid’s Tale), Vladimir Nabokov (#54, Lolita), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (#60, One Hundred Years of Solitude), Joseph Heller (#77, Catch-22), and Jack Kerouac (#87, On the Road). It’s very much a classics list, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch coming in at #1, followed by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.