Angel Madison and Zarah A. Kavarana scoured the best-seller and awards lists and came up with an article on The Most Popular Book the Year You Were Born, starting with 1945.

If you happen to have been born in 1981, the most popular book that year was John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment in the famed novelist’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom quartet of novels about a middle-aged middle-class American male who peaked in high school as a basketball star.

Have a look to see what was at the top of everyone’s “to read” list back when you were born.

The Great Gatsby is often cited as a contender for that elusive (and purely speculative) title of “Great American Novel,” and editors of The Atlantic used that novel as a starting point for reconsidering what that term actually means in order to construct their own list of “The Great American Novels.”

The editors decided to define “American” as having been first published in the U.S., they narrowed the field to the past 100 years (“a period that began as literary modernism was cresting”), and they approached “scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it” asking for suggestions. Their aim: “the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose.” That resulted in a list of 136 books, and if you break that list down by decades it looks like this: 7 from the ’20s, 9 from the ’30s, 7 from the ’40s, 13 from the ’50s, 15 from the ’60s, 19 from the ’70s, 12 from the ’80s, 16 from the ’90s, 14 from the ’00s, 21 from the ’10s, and 3 from the current young decade—reflecting, perhaps, a fairly large familiarity factor based on the ages of those who weighed in.

“This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction [Updike’s two winners from the Rabbit series didn’t make the cut], and three children’s books. . . . At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before.”

Of Couples, one of the editors writes, “Couples caused a scandal when it was first published, but it was easy for Updike to weather. Having written a novel about suburban adultery before such novels were commonplace, he anticipated some outrage. No matter: The fainting-couch wailing only made him more famous. But what did matter to Updike were the friendships that he nuked. The book was a thinly disguised ethnography of his bored and prosperous social set in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which was torn between rigid WASPy mores and the enticements of the sexual revolution. Not all of his friends forgave him. How could they? It’s one thing to have your dinner-party pretensions and proto-polyamory exposed on the page. It’s quite another to have them rendered in precise lyrical prose by an all-time great American stylist. Nearly 60 years on, their loss is still our gain.”

Most lists are Top Ten or Top 100, but no one ever accused Art Garfunkel—the quieter half of the Simon & Garfunkel folk-rock duo—of being like “most.” The singer decided to log each book he read, beginning in 1968—the year that the duo’s “Mrs. Robinson,” written for The Graduate soundtrack, won Grammy Record of the Year.

Garfunkel shared all 1195 books with fans in 2013. Since then, he’s whittled down the list to 157 favorite books. Updike’s Rabbit, Run made the list. Read about the rest of Art Garfunkel’s favorite books in this Nov. 18, 2023 Far Out article by Jordan Potter.

Writing for the Vancouver Is Awesome website, Ryan Beil suggested “3 books about baseball to put on your summer reading list . . . and no, they aren’t Shoeless Joe or Moneyball.”

“Generally speaking, in the summer months when I’m not watching baseball, I enjoy lazing about and cracking a good book. And believe it or not, those books often feature baseball itself or baseball-adjacent ideas and themes. My obsession never takes a break,” Beil wrote.

He named “a couple of baseball books that I’ve enjoyed to add to your summer reading lists”:

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller (about running a minor league baseball team)

Winning Fixes Everything, by Evan Drellich (a book about the Astros cheating scandal that the journalist bought but has yet to read)

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, by John Updike.

“This one isn’t even a book. It’s an essay. But it does come in book form. I know because I’ve acquired it. And this time, I’ve even read it! On Sept.28, 1960, Ted Williams played his last game of baseball at the legendary Fenway Park. John Updike, then 28, was watching that day and he penned this famous essay about the experience and Ted Williams rocky life in Baseball. It’s capital “R” Romantic about baseball, just a beautiful piece of writing. I think you could even read it online. Go ahead. Google it. I dare you.

“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.

Jules Buono of The Literary Lifestyle published a list of “75 Famous Last Lines of Books That Make the Best Book Endings,” and John Updike’s title-specific last line of Rabbit, Run made the list . . . though you have to scroll down quite a ways to read Updike’s ending: “He Runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”

If Buono ever compiles a list of the best short story titles, odds are that Updike’s “Your Lover Just Called” will probably make the list.