Category Archives: Lists

Happy Magazine includes Updike on its list of best erotic novels

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Some of the titles on this list by Ria Pandey are actually short story collections, but no matter: here are 34 of the most titillating erotic works of fiction, according to the author. Updike’s Couples made the cut, but many Updike fans might be thinking Rabbit Is Rich worthy of the list as well.

Some of Updike’s plain-brown-wrapper company:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover—D.H. Lawrence
The Tropic of Cancer—Henry Miller
Story of O—Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage
Emmanuelle—Emmanuelle Arsan
Portnoy’s Complaint—Philip Roth
Delta of Venus—Anaïs Nin
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty—Anne Rice
Lust and Other Stories—Susan Minot
Vox—Nicholson Baker
The Thorn Birds—Colleen McCullough
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.—Catherine Millet

Of Couples, Pandey writes, “Couples details the lives of ten married couples living in a New England community who create a sex cult. While it sounds simple on the surface level, Couples embarks on an intense emotional and psychological meditation on the nature of love, sex, and commitment. A review by Time describes the events of the novel as such: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”

Retiring book critic names his Top 20 memorable books

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When you’ve been a book critic as long as Craig Brown has, you deserve one of the longest headlines in recent memory: “Why, after 23 years and 1.5 million words as Mail on Sunday’s book critic, I think Jade Goody is up there with Dickens’: After writing the equivalent of War and Peace (twice), CRAIG BROWN hangs up his pen – and remembers 20 titles he most enjoyed reading.”

Click on the link above to read his farewell remarks.

As for the “20 Most Memorable Books I’ve Reviewed,” here they are:

Waterlog—Roger Deakin
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher—Kate Summerscale
Birds and People—Mark Cocker
Once Upon a Secret—Mimi Alford
Madeleine—Kate McCann
A Very English Scandal—John Preston
This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood—Alan Johnson
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power—Robert A. Caro
Out of Sheer Rage—Geoff Dyer
Untold Stories—Alan Bennett
Simon Gray’s Diaries—Simon Gray
Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979—Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Tamara Drewe—Posy Simmonds
The Man Who Went into the West—Byron Rogers
The Examined Life—Stephen Grosz
The Year of Magical Thinking—Joan Didion
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film—David Thomson
Anne Tyler’s Novels—yes, any of them
Tales of a New Jerusalem—David Kynaston
Endpoint and Other Poems—John Updike

“Updike died in 2009, having written more than 50 books, all of them, as Tobias Wolff once observed, ‘suffused with the pleasure of simply being alive’. Ths posthumously published book of poems, written when the end was in sight, is full of wonder and delight.”


Updike’s Couples makes a reading list on transformative love

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Literary Hub recently published a recommended reading list “From Eve Babitz to Raven Leilani, Readings on Solipsistic, Transformative Love” by Lillian Fishman. Surprisingly, Updike’s 50-year-old novel Couples makes the list. Fishman writes,

“A novel apparently about sex, Couples is actually about something much more interesting: how adultery itself—’its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master’—can breathe life into a prematurely settled existence. Though he describes a number of affairs among the couples of Tarbox, Updike follows most closely behind Piet, whose womanizing is never premediated but who falls into one affair-adventure after another, believing his talent is that he genuinely loves every woman he touches. Sincere and special in the way it expresses how we explain ourselves to ourselves, and deeply forgiving of our failings, especially when they occur in the service of reanimating a life.

Also recommended are books by Raven Leilani, Annie Ernaux, Eve Babitz, Celia Paul, Peter Stamm, Kathleen Collins, and Sheila Heti. Fishman, who was born nearly 30 years after Couples was published, is the author of Acts of Service (Hogarth Press).

ShortList writer lists books that would make great movies

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As 2021 was coming to a close and people were starting to anticipate doing things again given relaxed COVID restrictions, like going to movies and concerts again, Marc Chacksfield came up with a wish list of “brilliant” books that he thought would also make for great cinema. His ShortList article suggests:

1—The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
2—The Power of The Dog, by Don Winslow (a different novel from the Netflix film)
3—Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
4—Not Fade Away, by Jim Dodge
5—We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
6—Roger’s Version, by John Updike
7—The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai
8—The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates
9—Paris Trance, by Geoff Dyer

Of Roger’s Version, Chacksfield writes, “John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick was a big screen smash when it was adapted by director George Miller at the end of the Eighties. As such, it’s surprising that more of his novels haven’t been given the cinematic green light. Roger’s Version would be perfect—taking in middle age disillusionment, the sexual allure of a younger woman and questions pertaining to the existence of God. See, someone make it already!

Banned books: Updike’s Rabbit is in good company

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Unsurprisingly, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is banned in many schools. But so is George Orwell’s Animal House, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—all books, like Rabbit, Run, that were once taught in schools without protest.

But when books like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Bill Martin Jr./Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web also make the banned books list, it sends a message more disturbing than the act of censorship: it’s sad proof that American minds are narrowing more than ever before.

Here’s an article on “45 Books You Read in School That Are Banned Now,” which was published in Earn Spend Live.

Updike’s Couples is among the suggested readings on transformative love

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Literary Hub is no stranger to John Updike, and a recent article, “From Eve Babitz to Raven Leilani, Readings on Solipsistic, Transformative Love” by Lillian Fishman, includes John Updike’s Couples.

Of the novel, Fishman writes, “A novel apparently about sex, Couples is actually about something much more interesting: how adultery itself—’its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master’—can breathe life into a prematurely settled existence. Though he describes a number of affairs among the couples of Tarbox, Updike follows most closely behind Piet, whose womanizing is never premediated but who falls into one affair-adventure after another, believing his talent is that he genuinely loves every woman he touches. Sincere and special in the way it expresses how we explain ourselves to ourselves, and deeply forgiving of our failings, especially when they occur in the service of reanimating a life.”

Other novels referenced and recommended are Luster: A Novel (Raven Leilani), Simple Passion (Annie Ernaux), Slow Days, Fast Company (Eve Babitz), Self-Portrait (Celia Paul), Seven Years (Peter Stamm), Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (Kathleen Collins), and Pure Colour (Sheila Heti).

Fishman is the author of Acts of Service, available from Hogarth Press.

Literary Hub recommends the best Bard reimaginings

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Last week Literary Hub ran an article “On Reimagining the Infinite Dramatic Scope of Shakespeare and His Immortal Characters,” in which Kathryn Barker recommended “five cracking titles that rework the Bard’s famous plays.”

It will come as no surprise to fans of John Updike that Gertrude and Claudius made the list. Of Updike’s imaginative historical novel, Barker wrote, “Shakespeare’s play Hamlet kicks off with a powder-keg dynamic for its titular character—his father is dead and his mother has married his uncle. But how did things get so complicated? In Gertrude and Claudius, Updike explores the lives of Hamlet’s mother, father, and uncle before the Prince of Denmark vowed his revenge and took center stage. A prequel that ends just after the start of Shakespeare’s play, this ambitious novel gives insights into characters who—in the original text—were largely supporting.”

Other novels that made the list: I, Iago by Nicole Galland; Ophelia by Lisa Klein; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard; and I Am Juliet, by Jackie French.

Barker might have included her own Waking Romeo, now available from Amazon, because it too is a retelling of a Shakespeare classic.

Keanu Reeves says Updike’s Rabbit novels are now his favorite

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Keanu Reeves was in the news again with the release of the new Matrix film, The Matrix Resurrections, in which Reeves reprises his iconic role of Neo. That means he’s now a hot interview subject, and interviewer Swapnil Dhruv Bose decided to ask the actor to name his all-time favorite books for Far Out Magazine.

John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy made the list. According to Bose,

“While discussing the works listed above, Reeves claimed that The Count of Monte Cristo was his favourite book as a child which sparked his interest in reading. Later, as a teenager, he matured into more serious existential works and started exploring the literary legacy of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

“After discovering Dostoevsky, Reeves enjoyed the works of authors such as Jim Thompson and William Gibson until he discovered Marcel Proust’s modernist magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. As an ageing actor now, he revealed that he finds more truth in the seminal Rabbit series by John Updike.”

Updike makes a Five Great Books reading list

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In a Husteust.com article that begins with a quote from Game of Thrones‘ Tyrion Lannister (“A mind needs books as a sword needs a sharpening stone”), “Five books you should read this year” are recommended:

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike

Of the Updike selection, the site says, “In terms of sheer skill, Updike is the ultimate master of the late 20th century. His sentences are astonishingly brilliant and his command of the language is almost nil.”

Clearly, the last part of that compliment doesn’t express what the author thinks it might. Which reminds us: the actual quote from Tyrion Lannister is, “My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind . . . and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much. . . .”

Rabbit Angstrom named one of The Guardian’s 100 best novels

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“Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, Updike’s lovably mediocre alter ego, is one of America’s great literary protaganists, up there with Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby,” The Guardian wrote in naming Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels No. 88 on their list of 100 best novels.

“John Updike is 20th-century American literature’s blithe spirit, a virtuoso of language whose perfect pitch illuminated every line he wrote with an airy and zestful brilliance,” Robert McCrum wrote. “He was always something of a miniaturist. His first hope was to be a poet. When that ambition misfired, he took his delight in the English sentence and made a name for himself as a New Yorker short story writer. Finally, he brought his gifts of wit, curiosity and invention to the American novel. By the end of his career, he had become one of the most complete and versatile men of letters in his country’s history. Among many possible fiction choices – his debut, The Poorhouse Fair; the sensational scandal of Couples; the exhilarating magical realism of The Witches of Eastwick – I’ve picked his panoramic masterpiece, the Harry Angstrom series, a portrait of America compiled over four decades: Rabbit, Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit Is Rich (1981); and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

Read the full article.