“Popular” and “classic” are relative terms in the world of books, because the bottom line is often whether a book or an author is still being read. That appears to be very much the case with John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy. Updike’s story of an American middle-class Everyman landed on “Goodreads’ 100 Best Books of All Time” list. Goodreads’ lists are compiled by readers who visit the site and use it to rate books and chart their own reading progress.
See who else made the Goodreads’ 100 Best Books of All Time list.
I wrote my master’s thesis on the imagery in the first three Rabbit books. The fourth had not yet been written. Reading any of these books is like stepping into a Time Machine and finding yourself in small town America in the 60s or the 70s or the 80s. The attention to detail. The precise use of language. Rabbit, the Everyman, seems baffled by the shifting cultural landscape as the decades pass and we feel his anguish as he suspects that his best days are behind him.