You’ve heard of dinner and a movie? Well, why not a book and a drink? That’s what led Toronto Star‘s Bruce DeMara to come up with a book and a compatible drink every Thursday this summer.

“Reading can be thirsty work. And so, every Thursday this summer, to acknowledge that prose can inspire our minds as well as what’s in our glass, we recommend a weekend read—a book that elicits the heat, the smell, the feel of summer—and a recipe for the perfect drink accompaniment.”

His recommendation for Thursday, August 7, 2014? John Updike’s 1978 satirical novel The Coup, set in the fictional sub-Saharan African nation of Kush, and a Saharan Martini, made from Amarula cream liquor and garnished with dark chocolate shavings. The recipe is included in the article, “A Book & A Read: The Coup’s desert setting will leave you parched.”

“This is a novel that will have you feeling parched from the opening pages,” DeMara writes. “Updike’s description of desiccated trees and animals, sun-blasted rock, blistering desert and withering heat is relentless. Although the protagonist is a devout Muslim and therefore an abstainer, the novel makes passing reference to Russian vodka, palm wine, guinea-corn beer and Kaikai.”

And why is it worth the read?

“As grim as the setting may be, the novel has much to recommend it, including an array of interesting characters—among them Ellellou’s four very different wives—and a comically absurdist tone. There’s an archly satirical streak throughout, skewering colonialism, consumerism, religion and Cold War geopolitics. Updike’s prose is, as always, challenging in its detail but evocative and rewarding.”

Pictured is the Saharan Martini, photo by Chris So.

Click on Victor Bond’s Golf Dream blog and you’ll discover that the most recent post is “John Updike, Golfer” by David Owen, which begins, “If golfers were allowed to vote for the Nobel Prize in literature, John Updike would have won it in 1991, when The New Yorker published his short story ‘Farrell’s Caddie.'” The article-remembrance originally appeared in the April 2008 Golf Digest.

Here’s the link.

The ubiquitous Adam Begley has written a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Adam Begley on mighty mothers,” in which he names five books that feature dominant matriarchs. Given his recent biography of John Updike it’s no surprise that he included Updike, and even less of a surprise that the book he chose was Of the Farm, the novel that Updike has said was written about his mother. You need to subscribe to access the full article, which was published in the Bookshelf/Life & Culture section on May 16, 2014, but here’s what he had to say about Updike:

Of the Farm

By John Updike (1965)

4. There are only four voices in this gem of a novel, a fractious quartet performing under a spotlight in and around an elderly widow’s isolated Pennsylvania farmhouse. Joey Robinson, a 35-year-old mama’s boy, has brought his second wife, Peggy, and her young son to visit Joey’s garrulous, manipulative mother. By the second night, Joey’s mother has bullied him into agreeing that Peggy is vulgar and stupid and that divorcing his first wife was a mistake. After an emotional melee worthy of Edward Albee, mother and son achieve a kind of mutual forgiveness. But when all the skirmishes are done, and all the wounds more or less neatly bandaged, Joey and his mother engage in a bit of pointed banter about selling the farm after she is dead. She refers to it as “my farm,” and before he replies, Joey reflects: “We were striking terms, and circumspection was needed. I must answer in our old language, our only language, allusive and teasing, that with conspiratorial tact declared nothing and left the past apparently unrevised.” He says, “Your farm? . . . I’ve always thought of it as our farm.” The mother-son conspiracy endures.

After a brief hiatus, The Other John Updike Archive is posting again:

“In Every Dream Home A Heartache”

“Will you still love me tomorrow?”

“And In The Beginning…”

“Couples: The story you’re about to read is true…”

“Celestial Seasonings (on being JUish)”

“Here’s looking up your old address”

“Cape Fear Redux”

“Ex Pat Updike? Not bloody likely!”