There are all sorts of interesting blogs out there, and on one called The Pulitzer Project, Joshua Riley and Drew Moody have “committed themselves to reading all 85 Pulitzer Prize-winning novels” and posting reviews.

Here are the entries that relate to Updike:

“Entry 80.1: an Introduction to John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Series”

“Entry 80.2: ‘Rabbit Is Rich’ by John Updike (1982)”

“Entry 81: ‘Rabbit at Rest’ by John Updike (1991)”

If you’re following Adam Begley on Twitter you already saw this, but today the Updike biographer tweeted his recently unearthed mini-review of Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius from Vol. 53, No. 14 (April 10, 2000) titled “Picks and Pans Review: Gertrude and Claudius”:

“It is winter in Denmark, in the soon-to-be-haunted castle of Elsinore, which, we are told, sits in a “foggy hinterland, where the sheep look like rocks and the rocks look like sheep.

“To Bleat or not to bleat? In this ingenious prequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, National Book Award winner John Updike dazzles with plenty of wordplay before the swordplay. Instead of fussing with a clever plot that dovetails with the Bard’s, Updike tells a simple love story and offers brilliantly nuanced portraits of two characters Shakespeare merely sketched—Queen Gertrude (Prince Hamlet’s mom) and King Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle turned wicked stepfather). This is a new perspective—that of a middle-aged queen falling for her husband’s darkly mysterious younger brother. Tragedy broods in the wings, of course. But for the space of this short, sly novel, the guilty couple share sweet romance. (Knopf, $23)

Bottom Line: Rich remaining of classic characters

Contributors: Paula Chin, Kim Hubbard, Adam Begley, Ralph Novak, Mike Neill, Kyle Smith, Debbie Seaman.

In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible, critic Ingrid D. Rowland bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible.”

That led her to take exception with Updike’s “irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones ‘haunches'” and to name him, along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as standard bearers for the “apogee” of novelists whose works command a largely male readership. Here’s what she wrote in response to fellow theater critic Quentin Letts:

“Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers’ irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones “haunches”)—or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Yaël Farber, The Crucible’s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed “artistic license” in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.”

“The Witches of West End”