Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom makes Goodreads’ 100 Best Books of All Time

“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.

Updike’s coven makes another best witch movie list

John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick has become one of the author’s most popular books over the past decade, and maybe that’s because the 1987 film version has become a bit of a coven classic. Yesterday another list of top witch movies included the Eastwick bunch.

“The magic of Witch Movies: A Look at the best films about Witches,” by Deepak Kumar, was posted June 3, 2023 on the Fansided website. The George Miller-directed film was the fourth one listed, after The Witch (2015), The Craft (1996), and Hocus Pocus (1993). Of the film, Kumar wrote, “The Witches of Eastwick is a dark fantasy-comedy film released in 1987. Based on the novel by John Updike, the story is set in the fictional town of Eastwick, Rhode Island and centers around three women who unexpectedly discover they possess supernatural powers.” By getting divorced, one might add.

The film had plenty of star power, with Jack Nicholson as Daryl Van Horne, Cher as Alexandra Medford, Susan Sarandon as Jane Spofford, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie Ridgemont. Future Best Actor Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins played Clyde Alden, editor of the local newspaper. Though it didn’t wow critics or audiences, The Witches of Eastwick received Oscar nominations for Best Sound and Best Original Score (John Williams). And it won a BAFTA for Best Special Effects.

If you visit The John Updike Childhood Home in Shillington, Pa., look for The Witches of Eastwick original theater poster. Nearby, in a case that also contains items related to Updike’s appearance on The Simpsons, will be a concert program used as a prop in the film.

Rabbit, Run and 74 other novels lauded for last lines

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.

Adam Gopnik recommends six books

Longtime New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik‘s most recent book, The Real Work, explores how artists and exalted others reach an unsurpassed level of mastery. He considers the process and what it might mean for those mere mortals who seek inspiration or who would follow in the masters’ footsteps.

The Week used the occasion to quote Gopnik’s recommended six books:

Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell (1791)

The Most of Liebling, by A.J. Liebling (1963)

The Early Stories, by John Updike (2003)

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, by J.D. Salinger (1955)

Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust (1913)

Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford (1957)

Of Updike, he writes, “Miracles of observation, evocation, and poignant emotion. Though Updike is not a writer of happy subjects—the pains of marriage, the loss of time—he makes readers happy by the sheer perfection of his craft and his deep delight in the sensual surface of the world. He sings, and we harmonize.”

The AARP Updike . . .

Not surprisingly, since much of John Updike’s writing dealt with aging and mortality, his works have resonated with members of AARP.

In July 2006, Updike contributed an essay on “The Writer in Winter” to AARP The Magazine, in which he began, “Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. There is no Senior Tour for authors, with the tees shortened by 20 yards and carts allowed. No mercy is extended by the reviewers; but then it is not extended to the rookie writer, either. He or she may feel, as the gray-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume oxygen in the increasingly small room of the print world, that the elderly have the edge, with their established names and already secured honors. How we did adore and envy them, the idols of our college years—Hemingway and Faulkner, Frost and Eliot, Mary McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty! We imagined them aswim in a heavenly refulgence, as joyful and immutable in their exalted condition as angels forever singing.

“Now that I am their age—indeed, older than a number of them got to be—I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity.” (Read the whole “Life Lessons” essay)

In “Books for Grownups December 2008,” AARP The Magazine recommended The Widows of Eastwick: “Quintessential boomer author Updike checks in on the witches of Eastwick and finds them older, but no less crafty and bawdy.”

In “Books for Grownups August 2009,” The Magazine included My Father’s Tears as another example of “What Our Generation Wants to Read!”: “Updike’s final book, a collection of short stories, is heavy with mid- and late-life troubles, from the mundane to the crushing. He’s in fine form here, and reading these might have you reaching for your old copy of Rabbit, Run.”

In 2013, The Magazine published Erica Jong’s list of “10 Essential Boomer Books,” and Updike’s Couples made the cut . . . along with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Stewart Brand’s The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.

A week’s worth of erotica to read this Valentine’s Day

Saumyaa Vohra, writing for the “Sex” section of GQ magazine, recommended “7 best erotic novels to read right now”—the right now, given the timing of the post, presumably being Valentine’s Day.

Number 1 on the list was Luster by Raven Leilani, followed by Carnage (Sarah Bailey), You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (Akwaeke Emezi), Set (Alexandria House), Call Me By Your Name (André Aciman), What Belongs to You (Garth Greenwell), and John Updike’s Couples.

Of Couples, Vohra wrote, “The former New Yorker writer, poet and Pulitzer Prize winner truly knows how to use the written word to its full potential; and this 1968 novel about a licentious circle of ten couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox is proof of that skill. Rife with historical events of the time (which make the book one with deeper value than simply being smutty indulgence–because one would expect no less from Updike), the book is enjoyable and incredibly hot, going into sexual detail that was unusual for its time but still holds up. And, like any good erotic novel from the days of yore, caused a tonne of controversy at the time.”

Updike makes Cillian Murphy’s Top 10 list

Books of Brilliance asked Irish actor Cillian Murphy (Inception, The Dark Knight, Breakfast on Pluto, Peaky Blinders) to name his 10 favorite books. Murphy, who won a Best Actor Irish Film and Television Award for playing a young trans woman in Breakfast on Pluto, told Books of Brilliance, “I’m less interested in the good man’s life, I’m more interested in the conflicted man’s life or the contradictory man’s life.” That has applied to his choice of roles as well as his choice of reading. Cillian’s 10 favorite books:

The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy
The Butcher Boy, by Patrick McCabe
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varnasi, by Geoff Dyer
Grief is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter
Eclipse, by John Banville
—”Rabbit” series, by John Updike
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
The Grass Arena, by John Healy
Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara

Updike’s three witches make third on this best-of list

A website named Otakukart just published an article by Arnab Ray on the “45 Best Magical Witch Movies That You Should know,” and wouldn’t you know it, George Miller’s 1987 adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick was the third film listed.

“When a desire comes true at a price, and a male protagonist enters their lives, three lonely and sex-deprived women (Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer), who have all lost their spouses, meet together once a week for drinking.

“This 1987 dark fantasy-comedy movie, which George Miller directed, is based on a novel written by John Updike. The movie is very fun to watch and will never leave you bored for the sake of establishing plot points.”

Updike included on American Purpose ‘favorite staff reads’ list

American Purpose has a holiday tradition where editorial board members, contributing editors, and staff share their favorite reads from the past year. They call it “Turning the Page.”

Board member Adam Garfinkle, who is also founding editor of The American Interest and serves on the board of advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, chose John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies as his favorite read of 2022.

“John Updike’s 1996 bestseller In the Beauty of the Lilies has become part of the pantheon of fictive meditations on the thick sinews of Protestant Christianity that run deep and wide within the American body social and politic,” wrote Garfinkle, a former speech writer for secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.

“It tells a multigenerational family tale starting in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1905 and ending four generations and eighty years later in a Waco-like conflagration near Bighorn, Colorado. When I read the book a quarter century ago I marveled at Updike’s storytelling skills despite being unable to bond emotionally with any of the characters—rather like how I have since felt about Marilynne Robinson’s multigenerational Christological stories spread out in multiple books.

“This year’s deliberately slower second reading collided with my more mature ruminations on the wider topic of Protestantism’s shaping of a nation rushing through time, and itself being reshaped in the process. The collision revealed more of Updike’s prophetic shrewdness amid his formidable literary skills than I discerned the first time around. Now that we live truly in an age of spectacle, something still inchoate in 1996, the dancing demons and angels of the Protestant bequest to America appear far more vivid to me. The book didn’t change as time passed, but the reader did.”

Golf Dreams makes another favorites list

Here’s an interesting list: All Sports Book Reviews asked more than 150 sportswriters to name the books they really love–not what books they think are the best. Just their all-time favorites.

With a sample size that large, of course the list is long—some 300 titles—categorized according to sport. Updike’s celebrated Hub Fan Bids Kid Adieu didn’t make the list, but his essays on golf did. Golf Dreams was one of seven favorites that sportswriters cited for links reading.

Other literary writers who turned up on this list include George Plimpton (Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last String Quarterback; Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring; The Curious Case of Sidd Finch), Pat Conroy (My Losing Season), Norman Mailer (The Fight), Joyce Carol Oates (On Boxing), and, of course, Richard Ford (The Sportswriter).