If you’re a reader you already know about goodreads.com, which helps readers keep track of books they want to read and provides a forum for readers to comment on books.

And the reader responses to Rabbit, Run are almost as fascinating to read as the novel itself.

“God, do I hate Rabbit Angstrom!” one reader wrote in 2009. “How much do I hate him? If I was in a room with Hannibal Lector, the Judge from Blood Meridian, the Joker from Batman, and Rabbit Angstrom, and someone handed me a gun with only 3 bullets, I’d shoot Rabbit three times.”

“I hate John Updike right now,” a female reader wrote earlier this year. “I hate him as an idealistic dreamer, for making me remember how ugly we are—all of us humans with our selfish hearts and boring thoughts, our fractious flaws, and our suffocating sense of doom and exceptionalism. I hate him as a woman, for cringe-worthy moments of misogyny, for the distancing male sexual fixation, and for making me wonder that even the kindly back massage my husband gave me last night was really just a covert attempt at foreplay. I hate him as a writer, for his beautiful way with details, drawing me in against my will with his quiet and clever descriptions. I hate John Updike because I don’t want to care about Rabbit Angstrom. I’d like to tell this dickhead Rabbit to go jump off the top of Mount Judge and leave me in peace—and yet here I am searching my local bookstore for the next installment.”

Ambivalence was a common theme, though there were both straight detractors and fans as well. But it’s interesting to see how people are responding to a book some 60 years after it was written.