In “11 Pieces of Literary Proof Marriage Has Never Been Easy,” posted on the blog Signature: Making Well-Read Sense of the World, Lisa Rosman creates a list of 11 that probably could have gone well into the 30s. Updike, of course, makes her list, along with Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Virgil (The Georgics), William Shakespeare (Macbeth), Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Gustav Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Stephen King (The Shining), and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).

Of the Updike selection, Too Far to Go, she writes,

“I’d be remiss if I omitted something by Updike, who captured the sensual disarray of mid-twentieth-century couples like nobody else. People tout his Rabbit chronicles but it’s in this tale of musical chairs-style couples that he best distills the sweet, slow longings of middle-class married life.”

Lists have no season but beach lists only come around once a year. This year, New York Magazine is recommending John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick as one of “The 100 Best Beach Reads.” 

What makes a “beach read”? NY Magazine thinks “the formula is pretty straightforward. Whether mass-market candy or high literature, a beach read needs narrative momentum, a transporting sense of place, and, ideally, a touch of the sordid.”

The best 100 books for sandy serendipity aren’t ranked, but rather listed in chronological order, starting with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and ending with Catherine Banner’s The House at the Edge of Night (2016).

Of The Witches of Eastwick, NY Magazine writes, “Updike was clearly having a ball in his story of suburban witches shacking up with a warlock.” Don’t we know it.

Mother Jones co-founder Adam Hochschild told The Week that his six favorite books are:

• The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott
• A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
• Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
• Trust Me, by John Updike
• The Gypsies, by Jan Yoors

Of Trust Me he writes, “I could pick almost any book of Updike’s short stories, but I chose this one because it has my favorite, ‘Leaf Season,’ about a family’s excursion to Vermont.

“I reread it almost every year. It’s like a perfect piece of music you can listen to again and again.”

“Adam Hochschild’s 6 favorite books”

Katie Roiphe has been all over the media as of late, promoting her book The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, in which she recounts the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter.

The latest article is “Katie Roiphe’s 6 favorite books that deal with illness and dining,” and surprising it’s not the same six. Making the cut are:

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy
• On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf
• Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens
• Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• This Wild Darkness, by Harold Brodkey
• Endpoint, by John Updike

Of the latter she writes, “These poems, which Updike wrote during his last couple of years, are startling, visceral responses to his lung cancer. They have his trademark elegance and sensual beauty, but they also have the urgency of news flashes. He writes his way through the harrowing experience — analyzing, raging, consoling, creating — and in the end produces an astonishing coda to an unusually and gloriously productive life.”

Romper.com today posted a list article by Lindsay Mack, “11 Books With Amazing Sequels, So You Can Keep On Reading,” and one of the 11 she selected was John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick and The Widows of Eastwick. In fact, they’re the first books on her list.

“John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick follows the adventures of three women who find themselves beset with amazing powers, as well as the interest of an intriguing newcomer to the town. And this bitingly humorous story continues with The Widows of Eastwick, in which the trio reconvenes 30 years later to come to terms with their pasts.”

And, one might add, aging . . . a frequent theme of Updike’s.

Also making her list: Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan; The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory; Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease; The Shining and Dr. Sleep by Stephen King; Amitav Gosh’s Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke; Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You and After You; Gregory Maguire’s Wicked and Son of a Witch; War Horse and Farm Boy by Michael Morpurgo; and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Eventide.

John Updike’s Selected Poems made the list of “10 Books We Loved in 2015” by PBS NewsHour.

“John Updike: Selected Poems,” edited by Christopher Carduff
Mike Melia, senior broadcast producer

“He’s one of the most prolific American writers, but John Updike was not known as a poet. His novels, stories and essays fill volumes. Now, there is a new collection of his verse. A highlight, for me, is ‘Endpoint,’ a series of poems written in the last years of his life. They may be my favorite things he ever wrote. Here’s a stanza from ‘Spirit of 76’:

Be with me, words, a little longer; you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.

Publishers Weekly asked Christopher Carduff, “who was handpicked by John Updike to edit the Library of America edition of his work” and  “also edits the posthumous Updike publications for Knopf, the later of which, John Updike: Selected Poems, will be published this month,” to choose 10 of “his favorite books by Updike in a variety of genres.”

The Centaur, which won the National Book Award, didn’t make Carduff’s list, nor did any of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy novels or the Bech books. Neither did Midpoint, Updike’s mid-life poetic crisis, nor Couples, the steamy novel that vaulted Updike into national prominence.

Click here to see Carduff’s “10 Best John Updike Books.”