In “Books provide Guantánamo detainees an ‘escape from darkness,'” The Miami Herald recently reported details of a fairly substantial collection of books that was anonymously donated to Guantánamo prison, which now has a library of some 19,000 books.

Among them is Rabbit at Rest, the fourth installment in Updike’s Rabbit quartet.

“The approved list included poetry, fiction, art, math, history, religion, politics and current events—plus chemistry, physics and electronics books, which may strike some as strange for a place that the United States says imprisons wannabe bomb makers and hijackers,” reporter Carol Rosenberg writes.

“Name a classic you read in school and it’s probably here—from John Steinbeck to William Shakespeare to Mark Twain. Also, four novels by Haruki Murakami, who happens to be the donor’s favorite author. About half are in Arabic or are dual Arabic-English side-by-side translations.

“Some titles might suggest a subliminal message for an indefinite detainee in the war-on-terror—Charles’ Dickens Hard Times, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Or John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest?

In Rancho Cucamonga, which sounds like a made-up place, “Parents were shocked when they discovered a novel with erotic dialogue was being checked out and read by their children in their middle school’s library,” according to a CBS Los Angeles report.

The novel was Rabbit Is Rich, and the reaction is no surprise. Even Updike scholars would probably tell their pre-teens to hold off on that one until high school or college.

The principal removed the book from the school’s library. “After the investigation, if it is determined that the book had been checked out by other students, those students’ parents will be notified”—which sounds a little like people with sexually transmitted diseases having to notify all their partners.

The book apparently was donated, which is why it flew under the radar. Bottom line:  Rabbit Is Rich won the Pulitzer Prize and it’s a great book. But at what age?

“District Investigates After 12-Year-Old Gets Novel With Sexual Passages FRom School Library.” 

One of the events at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival paired two biographers:  Adam Begley and William Burroughs biographer Barry Miles.

Nick Major posted “EBIF2014: Adam Begley on Updike and Barry Miles on Burroughs” as a guest blogger—a summary of the presentation and a reminder, perhaps, that comparative studies need not always be of kindred spirits.

“The discussion chopped and changed between talk of Burroughs and Updike,” he writes. “It was almost a real-life replica of Burroughs’ famous cut-up technique of writing novels. Although it was thankfully told in plain English and only the occasional sentence was sliced in two. Updike was from a poor background. Burroughs came from wealth. Updike went to Harvard. So did Burroughs. Updike went on to work for The New Yorker. Burroughs became a heroin addict. Updike quit The New Yorker to become a full time novelist. Burroughs quit the country after a game of William Tell went wrong and he killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. Updike ‘never broke any laws.’ Burroughs made his own laws.

“Begley shadowed Updike as a journalist in the mid-1990s. Burroughs invited Miles to catalogue his archives in 1972. . . . It was a woefully small audience that were fortunate enough to hear these two biographers talk about their subjects in such fine detail. It was a shame such fascinating insights found so few ears. Most of those present were there out of an interest in Updike, so the last words should go to that notoriously generous reviewer who ‘took in the entire globe as a critic.’ Responding to Burroughs’ Port of Saints Updike wrote: ‘claptrap, but murderous claptrap and for that we owe it respect.'”

Here’s the full article.

In a brief piece originally published in The Scotsman and reprinted by WOW24-7, David Robinson writes,

“Apart from Harvard, biographers Adam Begley and Barry Miles agreed, their subjects – John Updike and William Burroughs respectively – had almost nothing in common, though as Begley generously pointed out, ‘even if Burroughs hadn’t written a word, his life would still have made a fascinating biography.’

“In his fiction, Updike’s nostalgia for his small-town childhood home of Shillington, Pennsylvania, was intense. It was, he said, where all his ‘artistic eggs were hatched.’ And while Burroughs headed out for life’s extremes, at least Ulpdike did go home again.”