Of COURSE Updike makes a list of books about adultery

Only 247 people voted for “The Best Books About Adultery” thus far, but those folks don’t seem to be familiar with John Updike’s Rabbit novels, none of which made the top 100. That includes two Pulitzer Prize winners—Rabbit Is Rich, in which Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom engages in wife-swapping (but is maneuvered into getting a different woman from the one he was lusting after), and Rabbit at Rest, in which he famously has sex with his daughter-in-law.

But Updike’s 1968 novel Couples made the list, clocking in at #8, no doubt helped by the notoriety the book initially generated when it put Updike on the cover of Time magazine as the spokesperson for the “post-pill society.”

Topping the list? Tama Janowitz’s Peyton Amberg, followed by The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne), Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), A Child’s Book of True Crime (Chloe Hooper), and The Quickie (James Patterson). Rounding out the Top 10 are The Little Women (Katharine Weber) and Lying (Wendy Perriam).

Here’s the full Ranker list, where you too can vote a book up or down.

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