Remember those brick-and-mortar bookstores, with their cafés and comfy chairs? If you’re in one and have a golfer to buy for over the next few days, several Updike books have made a number of “nice” lists this season.

Writing for Shepherd: Discover the best books, James Y. Bartlett, author of a series of Hacker Golf Mysteries—Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty, Death from the Ladies Tee, and Member-Guest—recommends “The best books of golf fiction.” For literary golf enthusiast John Updike, Bartlett singles out A Month of Sundays.

“John Updike, writing about golf? Well, why not? This novel, from one of America’s greatest writers, is something of a riff on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, in a story about a disgraced minister sent off on a sabbatical. He keeps a daily journal, which is what makes up the novel.

“Naturally, this being Updike, there are stories about his affairs, his drinking, his family relationships, and more. But there are also wonderful passages about his golf game. Like much of Updike’s work, this book is thought-provoking and an interesting window into the American mind of the 20th century.”

If your golf devotee is into non-fiction, Updike’s Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf is highly recommended by Golf Digest. It’s one of “The 50 Golf Books Every Golfer Should Read,” according to the editors.

“In his essays, the celebrated writer talks about the experience of playing the game and how we are attached to its subtleties.”

Shepherd, a blog for book lovers, recently posted an article by Jóhannes úr Kötlum on “10 books like Christmas is Coming” that starts with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but instantly moves on to other ghost stories or creepy tales, like The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas by Al Ridenour, The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Walter Scott, and Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

“No list of the delightfully dark would be complete without an appearance by the preeminent gothic illustrator, Edward Gorey. Gorey’s wry, one-of-a-kind style brings to life (and death) John Updike’s dark deconstruction of 12 Christmas traditions. Though it’s now out of print, this title is a must-have for any Edward Gorey enthusiast, and for any fan of the unlimited imaginative potential when artists look beyond the lights of the holiday season to focus on the shadows instead,” Kötlum writes.

Rounding out the list are The Elves And The Shoemaker by the Brothers Grimm and Jim LaMarche, Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James, A Yuletide Kiss by Glynnis Campbell, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, Six Geese a Laying by Emily E.K. Murdoch, and a holiday book not yet ready to give up the ghost: Dark Halloween by Eleanor Merry, Cassandra Angler, and Brian Scutt.

Here’s one poll that might have amused John Updike: the Jacksonville (Ill.) Journal-Courier asked readers to vote on their must-see films for Halloween, and, wouldn’t you know it, the cinematic adaptation of Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick made the list. That’s no doubt because of Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top performance as Darryl Van Horne and director George Miller’s decision to go Beetlejuice wild with Updike’s story of three divorcees in a small New England town where sexual politics and witchy mischief take center stage.

The 1987 Warner Bros. film starred Cher as Alexandra, Susan Sarandon as Jane, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie, with Veronica Cartwright playing Felicia and Richard Jenkins playing Clyde.

Editor David C.L. Bauer said that readers could choose from a list of “100 movies of all genres or add their own.” The Witches of Eastwick was the second film cited in the article, right after It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and ahead of The Ring, Coraline, Fright Night, Goosebumps, Evil Dead, Young Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Hocus Pocus.

Rotten Tomatoes critics weren’t quite as enthusiastic. Sixty-six percent of the critics who saw the film thought it was “fresh” and merited a 6 out of 10 or better.

Read the whole article.

Go ahead and guess. You know you want to.

Is it one of the novels (or short story cycles) featuring the irascible and irrepressible Henry Bech, Updike’s Jewish-writer alter ego?

Is it The Coup, Updike’s satire of American overconsumption and African dictators?

Is it one of Updike’s so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy–the commune exploits of S. or the punitive desert retreat to which that serial philanderer Tom Marshfield was sentenced that held comic forth in A Month of Sundays?

Nope. In the estimation of the folks at ShortList, it’s Updike’s Hawthornesque romp The Witches of Eastwick, which comes in at No. 13 on their list.

“The big screen adaptation is naturally hilarious,” ShortList writes, “but Updike’s original source material is a wonderful exercise in satire. Three women in the Rhode Island town of Eastwick acquire witch-like powers after being spurned by their husbands. Swearing to wreak vengeance they run amok until the mysterious appearance of Darryl Van Horne. What follows is high farce and social satire rolled into one. Mischievous doesn’t begin to cover it.”

Keziah Weir recently published a piece in Vanity Fair revealing “8 Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Month.” And what better fall reading is there than that Updike fall guy, Henry Bech—Updike’s Nobel Prizewinning Jewish alter ego, who tends to get in the same kind of awkward situations as Larry David?

The “we” includes Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Andrew Sean Greer, who tells Weir that he “felt a certain kinship with other writers who returned to the same character and voice again and again: ‘Most obviously for me is John Updike, his Rabbit books and his Bech books. Much more the Bech books, because there, John Updike seems to be just having a really good time, and I think those are more successful, looking back, than the Rabbit books, which just seem too misogynous to read. The Bech books are still a hoot.'”

Greer, who wrote Less and the sequel Less is Lost, also talks comparatively about Philip Roth and Updike before adding, “Finding a voice you want to always write in is just . . . You don’t want to let go of that for something else.” Maybe that explains why Updike chose to keep writing Rabbit novels and even a novella after his character’s death, and why Roth wrote about Nathan Zuckerman in “half his books.”

Asking a scholar or avid reader of John Updike to name Updike’s “best” will likely lead to a longer list than any superlative can contain. But Most Recommended Books took on the task, using an intuitive three-step process that involved searching “best john updike books,” studying the top five articles that came up in the search, and adding only books mentioned two times. Then they ranked the results, though we’re not told who “they” is or how they determined rank order. To quote Casablanca, the usual suspects are here, plus a few surprises in this somewhat suspect ranking:

Rabbit, Run
Rabbit Redux
Rabbit Is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
The Witches of Eastwick
The Early Stories
The Centaur
Bech: A Book
The Widows of Eastwick
Self-Consciousness
In the Beauty of the Lilies
Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
Couples
Bech at Bay

Reading for a hot August? A&E Book Club recommended “two classics and a new bestseller” to read before school starts in order to get you back in an academic frame of mind:

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell—a fictional narrative about Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway and the death of their son, Hamnet. The 2020 novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller. Writer Kennedy Moore noted, “With a simple but pristine writing style, O’Farrell approaches this story through a feminine perspective, focusing on the often overlooked figure of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway—or Agnes, as she is called in the novel. . . . Given the ubiquitous influence of Shakespeare’s plays on modern literature and film, writing anything compelling and original about the playwright or his works is challenging. However, O’Farrell has managed to pull it off in this novel.”

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving—from the author of The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. “Irving uses a surreal writing style to underscore a mystical plot and paint a nostalgic picture of childhood innocence. Beneath this nostalgia, Irving dives deep into politics and religion, two ever-present factors of American life. . . . Irving portrays spiritual characters and miraculous events while maintaining a modern liberal viewpoint.

Rabbit Run, by John Updike. “Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom is an average middle-class American from a small city in Pennsylvania. He was a high school basketball star, but after a surprise pregnancy and a shotgun wedding, he finds himself in a dead-end job in the town where he grew up. One day Rabbit gets in the car and decides to leave this world behind, wife and children included. 

“John Updike’s Rabbit series tracks this fictional character from his early twenties to the end of his life. Updike wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning series over four decades, authoring Rabbit, Run in 1960, Rabbit Redux in 1971, Rabbit is Rich in 1980 and Rabbit at Rest in 1990. The series is especially relevant today as shifting gender roles, the introduction of the birth control pill, abortion and American conceptions of sexual morality lie at the heart of the story. Rabbit, Run is the most gripping of the four novels and will especially resonate with men in their twenties. Not quite a coming-of-age story, this novel is about a man who feels trapped by his impending career, marriage and commitments.

“Reminiscent of Earnest Hemingway, Updike’s writing is not mystical or surreal but offers gritty snapshots of the world as it actually is. The sheer volume of the series adds to the payoff for the reader. By the end of the four novels, the reader knows each character like an old friend and, like the summer, is sad to leave them behind.”

Ulysses turned 100 this year, and to mark the occasion, The Sunday Times (UK) asked a jury of authors and critics to pick “the finest novels published since [James] Joyce’s classic.” Though Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it’s Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) that continues to make lists such as this.

Nine of The Times’ 14 jurists were women. “Between them they have read thousands of books, and their choices reflect this: the oldest book was published in 1924, the most recent in 2009. The list includes writers from Britain, Ireland, the US, Nigeria, India and South Africa, with subject matter just as diverse. You will find scalp-hunting outlaws, organ-donating clones and Wall Street traders.”

Of Updike’s novel, which the jury ranked #43, The Times wrote, “In high school Harry Angstrom was a basketball star. Now he’s a 26-year-old salesman, living in the suburbs with his wife, Janice, and son, Nelson. Bored and unsatisfied, he runs away and shacks up with a prostitute in his home town. The search for freedom is a classic American narrative, and here it’s told with aplomb, in charged, fierce prose.”

Read the full article.

Is Rabbit, Run still relevant today? The people at Noombee.com think so. In fact, they included Updike’s 1960 novel on a list of “Five books you should read this year.”

Recommended are Cormac McCarthy’s The Way, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Updike’s first Rabbit Angstrom novel.

“Only three authors have won multiple Pulitzer Prizes and one was John Updike. Rabbit, Run it is the first in a four-book series spanning Updike’s career. In terms of sheer skill, Updike is the ultimate master of the late 20th century. His sentences are amazingly brilliant and his command of the language is next to none.”

Actually, Updike was one of only four writers to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes in Fiction. The others were Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and, more recently, Colson Whitehead.

But the point is, like the Energizer Bunny, Rabbit keeps running . . . even well into the 21st century.