Esquire just got into the bucket reading list game with the recently uploaded feature on “The 80 Books Every Man Should Read.”
And of course Rabbit, Run made the list . . . “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 Telegraph in September (how did we miss that?) posted “100 novels everyone should read; the best novels of all time from Tolkien to Proust and Middlemarch,” and Updike made the list:
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
Updike contemporary Ian McEwan made the list (#30, Atonement), as did Muriel Spark (#48, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Toni Morrison (#50, Beloved), Don DeLillo (#51, Underworld), JD Salinger (#52, The Catcher in the Rye), Margaret Atwood (#53, The Handmaid’s Tale), Vladimir Nabokov (#54, Lolita), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (#60, One Hundred Years of Solitude), Joseph Heller (#77, Catch-22), and Jack Kerouac (#87, On the Road). It’s very much a classics list, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch coming in at #1, followed by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Brooklyn Magazine printed a fun piece titled “The Literary United States: A Map of the Best Book for Every State,” and John Updike made writer Kristin Iversen’s list.
The surprise? It wasn’t Pennsylvania or even Massachusetts that put Updike on this literary map. It was Rhode Island.
“41. Rhode Island: The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike.”
The editors of The American Scholar decided to out “famous and infamous writers” for “first sentences of a novel, either overwrought or just plain embarrassing, that elicit a groan or a smack of the forehead,” and included among them is John Updike’s opening to The Widows of Eastwick:
“Those of us acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised to hear, by way of rumors from the various localities where the sorceresses had settled after fleeing our pleasant town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the husbands whom the three Godforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for themselves did not prove durable.”
Also making the list is a novelist with whom Updike “competed” all of his writing life. Philip Roth was upbraided for his opening line to The Breast: “It began oddly.”
The editors’ “highly subjective list” is titled “Ten Worst Opening Lines.”
“Are the Nobel Prize-givers anti-American?” a feature in The Telegraph begins. “They have, after all, ignored giants of American literature, including Mark Twain, Henry James and John Updike. There have certainly been currents of anti-Americanism in the pronouncements from the Swedish Academy. In 2008, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary at the time, declared: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”
So are comments like that.
Updike was #10 on The Telegraph‘s list. The top snub was Leo Tolstoy, followed by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, WH Auden, Primo Levi, and Chinua Achebe.