Today, Vermont Public Radio’s Bill Mares posted “Mares: Just Looking,” in which he tells about reading Updike’s book, Just Looking, over the holidays and responds in his own thoughtful way—more reaction than review, really, but interesting nonetheless.

There’s also a “listen” button to click on if your eyes are tired of reading things on the computer, and you’ll hear Mares read the on-air version.

“My favorite essay in the book is called ‘Writers and Artists,'” he says, offering Updike’s own description as proof: “He describes his own excitement, at the ‘glistening quick precision, the possibility of smudging, the tremor and swoop that impart life to the lines'” of the drawings he attempted as a child.

“My only quibble is that Updike doesn’t include any reference to Chinese calligraphy, arguably one of the greatest intellectual endeavors which combines artistic expression and verbal meaning,” Mares says.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blogger Jim Higgins writes, “I’m reading and commenting on a story from the Library of America’s recently published John Updike: The Collected Stories each Wednesday until I finish the collection or give up.”

On January 1, 2014, he posted “Reading the John Updike stories: ‘Intercession,'” but if you scroll down you’ll find links to other Updike story commentaries. On January 8 he promises “a discussion of Updike’s story ‘The Alligators” and gives two stars to a story that “would go in my hypothetical Best of John Updike collection.” So far “His Finest Hour” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth” have made the grade, but not the frequently anthologized “Snowing in Greenwich Village” or “Friends from Philadelphia.”

‘Twas six nights before Christmas and all through the Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse there were signs from Updike’s “Rabbit” novels.

Blogger Peter Quinones takes note of the “Signs and Signage in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels” and offers a count and speculation for their frequent inclusion . . . and variation. Some of his conclusions seem like leaps—”Similarly, how do we go from 8 signs in one novel to 19 in the next? I would suggest that Angstrom’s reticular activating system has begun to be lit up to pay attention to signs, signage, and printed messages because he now works as a typesetter—it’s unavoidable”—but it’s fascinating to see what catches people’s attention from the “Rabbit” series.

In a reflective critical essay titled “Updike Redux,” published in Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009/2010) of The Common Review, William Giraldi writes, “Of all the American literary titans who have died within the past several years—Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Susan Sontag—John Updike was the most beloved.” Giraldi considers Updike’s popularity, oeuvre and literary legacy and draws a number of conclusions—among them, “We can classify the likes of Goethe and D. H. Lawrence as nothing other than men of letters, masters of many genres, and Updike was their descendant.”

The Common Review, The Magazine of the Great Books Foundation, was founded in 2001 but ceased as a print publication with the Fall/Winter 2011 issue. Thanks to Larry Randen, here’s a PDF of the full Giraldi essay.

Blogger Peter Quinones (Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse, “a blog about cinema and literature with a concentration on Bellow, DeLillo, Updike and Cavell but frequently branching out into so much more”) just posted “Tracking John Updike’s Foot Fetish – Part 1,” which includes six quotes from six of Updike’s publications as evidence and an admission that “this is only scratching the surface.” Here’s the link.

Maria Popova has compiled a number of quotes for an article on “John Updike on Writing and Death,” which was published online at Brain Pickings, much of it drawn from Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness. There are some interesting juxtapositions and conclusions here—like for Updike, “work—especially a writer’s work—serves the same purpose as religion (which, as Mark Twain famously grumbled, is chiefly an anchor of human ego.”

The Independent [London] for September 13, 2013 featured a piece by writer Justin Cartwright, who picked Rabbit at Rest for his “Book of a Lifetime.”

“Rabbit at Rest is a wonderful book, honest, detailed, perceptive and moving,” he writes. “Although quietly charming and without any symptoms of Bohemia, Updike was ruthlessly forensic with his characters. His description of Rabbit’s wayward son, Nelson, is devastating: in contrast to the free pass to life that Rabbit grants himself—he is, in his reckoning, tall, athletic, open and attractive, with a full head of hair—his son is small, balding and furtive with a drug habit and—worse—a trite kind of philophy, confidently uttered. How accurately Updike captures the new banality.”

Here’s the full story.

Some people think Jonathan Franzen is a literary giant; others think he’s just another talent with gigantic arrogance—the kind that enables him to turn down Oprah when every other writer in the country would do headstands for the chance to get that kind of audience.

What you think of him will probably affect what you think of the surprisingly nasty anti-Updike rant he went on in one of the “footnote excerpts” from Franzen’s translation of Austrian writer Karl Kraus that was posted September 6, 2013 on the Paris Review Daily.

What set him off was “Updike’s famous comparison of a writer’s work to excretion: you take in life, digest it, and shit it out in paragraphs,” and that leads him to a remarkably long and vitriolic rant which feels in part like a confession and part shotgun blast that also manages to shower a few buckshot pellets in Philip Roth’s direction.

It all sounds terribly Freudian, doesn’t it? Kill the [literary] father(s), and all that . . . . Some may smile that he also may have confirmed the excrement analogy with an example of his own.

The Guardian posted a rather grouchy column by Colin Robinson, “Writers should take a year off, and give us all a break,” illustrated by a photo of an older John Updike in backswing, looking at the flight of his drive.

“What if everyone stopped scribbling for a year? Will Self could pull on his hiking boots, Martin Amis could sharpen his tennis serve, and we could catch up on our reading,” Robinson writes. Apparently the glut of established writers is made even more pressing by a statistic he quotes:  that according the The New York Times, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them.