The entertainment section of The Independent today ran a Q&A interview, “A question of culture: Actor Emmet Kirwan,” in which they asked the young Irish actor what his favorite book was.

“Rabbit, Run by John Updike,” he answered. “The first of a quartet of Rabbit books, but still my favorite. It speaks to a restlessness in people edging towards 30. Updike makes a flawed American everyman character likable, even as he wrecks the lives of everyone around him.”

Ironically, when asked to name a book he couldn’t finish, Kirwan cited the Jack Kerouac novel that inspired Updike to write Rabbit, Run as a kind of counter-argument:

“On the Road. It’s one I felt I should read as opposed to wanting to. I was encouraged to give it a second chance, but found it tough work and boring.”

For Kirwan, “favourite city” was no contest: “It would have to be Dublin, wouldn’t it? It’s a capital city but it’s also a village. Just the right size.”

First Person Singular focuses on a January 14 blog post by Jon Busch titled “Getting Over Updike,” which begins,

“John Updike was a living legend around Gordon College. He lived mere miles from our tiny campus, and swapping tales of ‘Updike sightings’ was a common pastime among English majors.”

Updike “encounters” were apparently just as common, and Busch shares several humorous anecdotes, along with his somewhat embarrassed reaction to A Month of Sundays.

He writes, “Regardless of the absurdity and vulgarity of A Month of Sundays, I do wish we Gordonites had not irrevocably offended Updike all those years ago. His ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter’ alone is adequate atonement for a lifetime of bad sex writing.”

Gordon College is a Christian school in Wenham, Massachusetts. “Legend has it (and I have no way to verify this) that an intrepid English professor in the late seventies or early eighties struck up a friendship with Updike and asked him to come speak on campus. Updike accepted the invitation, but had to be ‘disinvited’ when the president of the college famously declared, ‘I don’t want that pornographer anywhere near our campus.

“Decades later, an Updike convocation was still off the table. Apparently, the man knew how to hold a grudge. We English majors held a grudge as well, against that ignorant, foolish president who damned us to an Updike-less, and thus incomplete, education.”

It was only after reading A Month of Sundays many years later that Busch says he developed “sympathy for the old president’s position.”

The late David Foster Wallace, who famously attacked Updike and other literary Johns, is featured in The David Foster Wallace Reader and the subject of a Newsweek cover story by Alexander Nazaryan.

For any fan of Updike who’s more familiar with Wallace’s sniping than with Wallace and his fiction, “The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace” provides a good summary of the career of the author of Infinite Jest, who killed himself in 2008.

In it, Updike is mentioned . . . of course, pejoratively.

In a Commonweal article inspired by Adam Begley’s recent biography, Rand Richards Cooper considers “The Charms of the Conqueror: How John Updike Made It Look Easy.”

“His writing flickers with the hope that the world was created, and thus merits the devotion of attention (by fictional characters) and description (by Updike himself),” he writes.

“The Rabbit novels are crammed with the trivia of American life down the decades, and their accumulating excess reminds us that far from being ‘untroubled,’ Updike wrote from a condition of spiritual urgency.”

“Having read Begley’s book, I shouldn’t be surprised that Updike wrote to the very end; still, I find myself awed by the courage it must have taken to sit in the fearful presence of death and write . . . a sonnet?”

Cooper concludes, “After someone we love dies, his or her voice stays with us, fresh and close, for years; we keep expecting the phone to ring with that voice on the other end; we experience frank disbelief, and renewed sorrow, at the idea that its owner truly is gone forever. It’s not much different with a writer one has loved. Keep company with a writer, in many books over decades of your life, and you grow accustomed to his presence; you hear his voice in much the same way you hear a friend’s or a sibling’s. Updike in his early years imitated other writers’ styles, channeling first Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and later Salinger and Nabokov—praising them by imitating their voices before eventually settling in to play his own exquisitely tuned instrument. Reading his prose in this life-and-art-affirming biography, I hear him vivid as ever, and miss him all over again.”

New Year’s means resolutions, and columnist Danny Heitman shared his with Christian Science Monitor readers:

“My New Year’s resolution: read more John Updike.”

“He appeals to me because, quite frankly, I finally have a decent chance of finishing one Updike book before another comes out. . . . What we now have, finally, is the prospect of seeing Updike whole. That’s a territory I’d like to explore the next 12 months, continuing a journey started many years ago,” writes Heitman, who said he began reading Updike as a college student.

“Updike’s acute perception—his ability to record the inner life of his childhood with such luminous detail [in Self-Consciousness]—was a small miracle to me. He seemed like a writer I should get to know.”

Heitman says that by reading all of Updike he’s anticipating the chance “to see an author grow on the page as you visit his early books, the middle ones, the later ones that top off a career. And there’s the promise of intimacy, too—the kind of closeness that develops, like any friendship, according to the number of hours one is willing to invest in it.”

Maybe inspired by all of the headlines the Cubs and other teams have been making with their big-splash off-season acquisitions, David Lull tracked down this interview with Roger Angell in which Angell mentions Updike’s famous tome on baseball and admits he modeled his own work after it.

“Annotation Tuesday! Roger Angell and the pitcher with a major-league case of the yips” was posted on March 11, 2014, and Angell’s comments about Updike come in response to the question, “Why baseball? What’s the pull for you?”

“Well, it was a good fit for me. I was always a baseball fan of good standing. I never planned to write this length; it was a huge surprise, an accumulating surprise. Shawn came to me in ’62, or something like that, and asked if I wanted to go down to spring training, because we hadn’t done enough sports. The only advice he gave me was, ‘There are two dangers in sportswriting: Toughness and sentimentality. Don’t be tough, and don’t be sentimental.’ And I said okay. The model for me going down there was John Updike’s Ted Williams piece, ‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,’ which had run a couple of years before. He put himself and his grownup sensibility into the stands. He was also a fan and an adulator of Ted Williams. It was probably Ted Williams’s last game. So he was writing about himself in the stands watching what happens, which is what I began doing in spring training. I was too nervous to sit in the press box, or to talk to any of the players — I didn’t dare do that. Spring training in those days was in Florida; a lot of very old, old people watching very young players. It was a nice mix. It was the first year the Mets were alive. They had not yet played a major league game. I saw them play the Yankees. That first year I wrote about the Mets a lot, because they were certainly a phenomenon. They were a terrible team that was loved by everyone in New York — antimatter to the Yankees. They were a terrible team but they were adorable. So I went back and wrote a little piece, which cranked me up and suggested I could do this.”