The September 4, 2015 print version of Entertainment Weekly has an interesting feature by Keith Staskiewicz and Isabella Biedenharn on “The United States of Books.”

“Which novel captures the true spirit of Iowa? How about Texas? Or Rhode Island? Here, EW picks the one work of fiction that best defines each state in the union.”

Is it any surprise that John Updike was chosen as the author whose novel best represents the spirit and character of Pennsylvania?

In choosing Rabbit, Run as the book that captures the spirit of Pennsylvania, the authors write, “Updike’s most famous work, the first of his Rabbit Angstrom novels, follows a former high school basketball star after he abandons his pregnant wife and child, taking suburban Pennsylvania ennui to a terrifying precipice.”

Since there’s no online link yet, here are all the state selections:

Alabama—To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Alaska—Julie of the Wolves, Jean Craighead George
Arizona—Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
Arkansas—True Grit, Charles Portis
California—Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
Colorado—Plainsong, Kent Haruf
Connecticut—The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare
Delaware—The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez
Florida—The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Georgia—Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Hawaii—The Descendants, Kaui Hart Hemmings
Idaho—Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Illinois—Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks
Indiana—The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
Iowa—Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella
Kansas—Doc, Mary Doria Russell
Kentucky—In Country, Bobbie Ann Mason
Louisiana—The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Maine—Empire Falls, Richard Russo
Maryland—The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
Massachusetts—The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
Michigan—Once Upon a River, Bonnie Jo Campbell
Minnesota—The Betsy-Tacy Series, Maud Hart Lovelace
Mississippi—The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Missouri—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Montana—A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean
Nebraska—My Antonia, Willa Cather
Nevada—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
New Hampshire—A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
New Jersey—Independence Day, Richard Ford
New Mexico—House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
New York—Drown, Junot Diaz
North Carolina—Jim the Boy, Tony Earley
North Dakota—Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
Ohio—Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
Oklahoma—The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Oregon—Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Pennsylvania—Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Rhode Island—Spartina, John Casey
South Carolina—The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
South Dakota—Black Hills, Dan Simmons
Tennessee—A Death in the Family, James Agee
Texas—Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Utah—The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
Vermont—Songs in Ordinary Time, Mary McGarry Morris
Virginia—The Known World, Edward P. Jones
Washington—The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
West Virginia—Lord of Misrule, Jaimy Gordon
Wisconsin—A Map of the World, Jane Hamilton
Wyoming—Close Range, Annie Proulx

Writer-editor-reviewer Robert McCrum has spent two years considering the 100 greatest novels written in English, and The Guardian recently published his final choices. Updike’s Rabbit Redux comes in at #88.

“Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, Updike’s lovably mediocre alter ego, is one of America’s great literary protagonists, up there with Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby.”

That’s pretty good company, and probably an interesting conversation to eavesdrop on if the three of them ever had to share a raft. However, Huck and Jay made McCrum’s “All Time Top 10” list—Emma, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, The Rainbow, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, The Great Gatsby—while Rabbit did not.

“The 100 best novels written in English: the full list”

In writing about his process, McCrum said that he selected, “where possible, the title most central to the author’s voice and vision, which is not necessarily the most famous.”

They’re in no particular order, but there are 80 books Esquire magazine thinks every man should read, and Rabbit, Run is among them:

“Because it’s one of the few not about Updike. It’s about that guy you idolized in high school. And kitchen gadgets. And you.”

“The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read”

Yes, Esquire is a man’s magazine, but it’s a little surprising that the authors listed are all male except for Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Updike, who’s been accused of being sexist, would probably be among those to protest, Where’s Toni Morrison? Alice Walker? Eudora Welty? Ann Beattie? Jane Smiley? Louise Erdrich? Lorrie Moore?

June is soon upon us and it’s come to our attention that a year ago Rachel Grate of Arts.Mic shared “14 Brilliant Pieces of Literature You Can Read in the Time it Takes to Eat Lunch.”

Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” comes in at #1, followed by John Updike’s “Pygmalion.”

“Inspired by the story of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story follows a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he carves. Updike transforms the narrative’s message to reveal the narcissism we all bring to love.

“Updike makes every sentence of this brief piece count, nonchalantly surprising his readers with a new twist in every paragraph. Soon, we begin to wonder how much of a relationship is based on who the other person really is and how much is based on how we transform them.

“Read it for free here,” courtesy of The Atlantic online. The story appeared in the July 1981 issue.

Only one of the American Nobel laureates made the Arts.Mic list:  Ernest Hemingway (“Hills Like White Elephants”).

Rabbit, Run gets all the attention, and Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest earned Pulitzer Prizes. But Guardian writer Robert McCrum says Rabbit Redux is his favorite—which is why he included it at #88 on his list of “The 100 Best Novels.”

“Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the account of whose life and times adds up to more than half a million words, is often placed with honor, and a measure of irony, next to America’s great literary protagonists such as Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby and even Captain Ahab,” McCrum writes. “Rabbit Redux was published in the US by Alfred A Knopf, a great literary house and a natural home for a novel that, from the title down, nodded to the Anglo-American literary tradition. Anthony Trollope (see No 22 in this series) published Phineas Redux in 1873, and Updike, who was steeped in English literature, would have enjoyed the allusion. Other critics have noted its ‘Dickensian’ ambitions.

“The Angstrom series had many inspirations, including Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Updike, who also venerated Lewis, always spoke warmly about his admiration for Marcel Proust, though ‘Rabbit’ has little to do, explicitly, with A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Ian McEwan [who, summarising Updike’s achievement on his untimely death in 2009, compared him to Saul Bellow (see No 73 in this series) as ‘a master of effortless motion—between first and third person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalization, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic’] described Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels as his ‘masterpiece.’ Philip Roth, a sometime writer, declared Updike to be America’s ‘greatest man of letters, a national treasure,’ while, for Lorrie Moore, Updike is ‘our greatest writer,’ though she prefers his short stories.”

Brian Hoey, a self-described “book nerd,” yesterday uploaded a piece for www.BooksTellYouWhy.com titled “Sex, Trash, and Eminem: Five Interesting Facts About John Updike,” one of which—that he couldn’t write sex scenes—is debatable.

But one “fact” may be new to the larger community of Updike readers and scholars:

4) His influence extends beyond Literature and into Rap Music.

“Or, at least, Eminem has read the firRabbitIsRichst installment in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ tetrology, Rabbit, Run (1960). The noted rapper was, apparently, so moved as to nickname the protagonist in his 2002 film 8 Mile ‘Rabbit,’ laying claim to a revitalization of the white-American-everyman archetype that Updike so forcefully established five decades ago. The film’s soundtrack, too, referenced Updike’s contribution to the canon with a track entitled ‘Rabbit Run,’ for those who might have missed the first reference.”

Mother’s Day is approaching and The Irish Times today ran a piece by literary correspondent Eileen Battersby.

In “Eileen Battersby picks her favorite fictional mums for Mother’s Day,” the journalist names John Steinbeck’s Ma Joad (The Grapes of Wrath) as one of her favorites. She also cites moms who appeared in fiction by James Stephen, Virginia Woolf, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Wolfe, Tim Winton, Paul Smith, Toni Morrison, Harriette Arrow, William Maxwell, Bertolt Brecht, Sun-Mi Hwang, and John Updike.

Which mom could it possible be from the Updike canon, you wonder? Certainly not Ma Springer or Harry’s mom, and of course Janice is a big no. The mothers from The Witches of Eastwick were hardly moms at all. The mom from Of the Farm? Close.

Battersby admires the mother remembered in Updike’s prize-winning short story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” which was republished in The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (1995).

“In this wonderful story, among his finest, the great Updike describes a middle-aged man, Joey, remembering his mother at various stages of her life. It is a story about his mother, and about every mother, because every mother was also once a very different person. At the heart of the story is the mother’s determination to move her family, her parents as well as her son, to the family home she set out to restore. It is about how a mother returned to her family home and sustained it was the place where both her vital years and her old age were spent.”

Pictured is Ma Joad from John Ford’s film version of Steinbeck’s Dustbowl novel, who gets one of the film’s best lines:  “Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t like us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”

Paste Magazine today featured a booklist post from Tyler Kane on “8 Entertaining Math-Inspired Reads for Pi Day.”

Topping the list was An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, better known for The Fault in Our Stars. Right behind him was John Cheever’s The Geometry of Love, followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein, John Updike’s Problems, and Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatist.

Of Problems, Kane writes, “Abandoning your family is as easy as simple math in John Updike’s bummer tale of domestic frustration. You’re treated to pages of a logic puzzle, dealing with the causes and effects that occur when A, B and C interact. Here, we see our main character juggling laundry, his children’s expenses and psychiatric visits—all in a new life with a younger woman. The worst part? This all looks easier on paper.”