In an April 4, 2025 post for The Wall Street Journal, Craig Brown (Q: A Voyage Around the Queen) revealed his choice for the five best books to tackle the subject of fame. Topping the list was David Kinney’s The Dylanologists, part-confession and part-reporting on Bob Dylan superfans and their antics, “a sharp and often hilarious book about the madness of fame and fandom.”
Coming in at #2 was Donald Sassoon’s Becoming Mona Lisa, which traces the path to superstardom of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous subject/painting—a study that Brown said “suggests that, contrary to popular and scholarly belief, posterity is a peculiarly fickle thing.”
Number 3 on the list is John Updike’s The Complete Henry Bech: “John Updike’s recurring character Henry Bech is the author of ‘one good book and three others, the good one having come first.’ Bech’s reputation increases as his output declines, and he spends his time giving speeches, accepting awards, signing books and appearing on television. ‘The appetite for serious writing is almost entirely dead, alas, but the appetite for talking, walking authors rages in the land,’ Updike once said, in an ‘interview’ with who else but Bech, his lazy, Jewish alter-ego. Collected here in The Complete Henry Bech, Updike’s satirical vignettes on the absurd distractions offered by literary fame grow more accurate with each passing year.”
Rounding out the list were Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month, a work of historical fiction from the Charles Dickens and P.T. Barnum era, and Pat Hackett’s The Andy Warhol Diaries, an edited collection of 1000+ entries that makes it “shamefully hard to stop” reading.
“The third installment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series finds Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom finally comfortable—or at least financially secure—amid the tumultuous backdrop of 1979’s oil crisis and stagflation. ‘How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?’ the narrator observes, capturing the novel’s eerie contemporary resonance: interest rates and real-estate climbing skyward—and staying there—and a gnawing certainty that the next generation won’t have it quite so good. Updike’s prose transforms the mundane rhythms of middle-class life into something approaching poetry as he excavates middle-class anxiety and success. Rabbit’s car dealership is printing money thanks to the Japanese vehicles he sells, even as his own prejudices and racial anxieties bubble beneath the surface. His son Nelson is adrift, the world seems to be coming apart at the seams and Rabbit’s own biases reflect the tensions of a changing America. The novel won Updike both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for its devastating precision in capturing what it means to ‘make it’ while watching the ladder get pulled up behind you.”
Of Updike’s novel she writes, “Mining, as did [Dorothy] Dunnett, some of Shakespeare’s own sources, Updike relied partly on Saxo Grammaticus’ twelth-century saga of Amlothi for details about the characters on which his Danish king and queen are based.
Sixties’ icon Marianne Faithfull, a singer-songwriter who was considered a major figure in the so-called “British Invasion” of U.K. music to hit the U.S. during the turbulent decade, 
Greatest Books of All Time on Teachers,” and it’s no surprise that John Updike’s 1963 novel, The Centaur, ranks high on the list. His tribute to his father (and teacher), Wesley Updike, did win the National Book Award, after all.
“In the small town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, three women — Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie — discover they have magical powers after their marriages end.
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.
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.
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.