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.”

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).

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.