The Express today ran a story about British Comedy Award winner Katy Brand (Katy Brand’s Big Ass Show), who shared her six favorite books. Topping the list:  Rabbit Is Rich, by John Updike.

“My favorite of the Rabbit books because it’s the most fun,” she says. “For some reason I find stories about ordinary American life romantic. In this he has taken over a car dealership and is making good money. I like the sense of living alongside a character through a series of books and it’s perfectly written.”

Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint also made her list, as did Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Jill Cooper’s Polo, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4.

Here’s the whole article:  “Katy Brand: My six best books – Polo, Alias Grace and more” 

Sean Wilson, writing for Den of Geek!, recently considered “The 15 greatest John Williams scores you’ve forgotten about,” and ranked Williams’ score of the 1970 screen adaptation of Jane Eyre as the composer’s most underrated score . . . with his 1987 score to the film version of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick coming in a close second.

“Another aspect of Williams’ musical personality that’s easy to underrate is his wicked sense of humor,” Wilson writes. “His folk-inspired, flighty and darkly comic score for George Miller’s outrageous John Updike adaptation so perfectly captures the whimsical menace of Jack Nicholson’s Satan that it’s hard to imagine the movie without it. It’s Danny Elfman before the latter even became famous.”

The folks at RealSimple.com have put together a reading list of “17 Great Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down,” and though John Updike’s Villages has been put down by a number of critics, the novel nonetheless made their list.

In choosing it, the editors called Villages an “intriguing commentary on sexuality in 1970s suburbia.”

As Amazon summarizes, “John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows its hero, Owen Mackenzie, from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, and early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. . . . “

Only 247 people voted for “The Best Books About Adultery” thus far, but those folks don’t seem to be familiar with John Updike’s Rabbit novels, none of which made the top 100. That includes two Pulitzer Prize winners—Rabbit Is Rich, in which Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom engages in wife-swapping (but is maneuvered into getting a different woman from the one he was lusting after), and Rabbit at Rest, in which he famously has sex with his daughter-in-law.

But Updike’s 1968 novel Couples made the list, clocking in at #8, no doubt helped by the notoriety the book initially generated when it put Updike on the cover of Time magazine as the spokesperson for the “post-pill society.”

Topping the list? Tama Janowitz’s Peyton Amberg, followed by The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne), Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy), Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), A Child’s Book of True Crime (Chloe Hooper), and The Quickie (James Patterson). Rounding out the Top 10 are The Little Women (Katharine Weber) and Lying (Wendy Perriam).

Here’s the full Ranker list, where you too can vote a book up or down.