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.

Updike lovers might be hard pressed to cite their favorite “funny” Updike book.

Is it A Month of Sundays, with its comedic premise of a clergyman sent to a curative retreat for wayward ministers because he was getting a little too intimate with his flock . . . and then can’t help himself from trying to seduce his overseer through journal entries he knows she’s reading? Or S., another book in Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy in which he pokes fun of the notion of suburban housewives needing to “find” themselves in a commune, only to discover another form of male dominated servitude?

Is it The Coup, with its hilarious satire of a Third World dictator and American consumerism?

Is it one of the sardonic, tongue-in-cheek books on Updike’s Jewish alter ego, Henry Bech (Bech: A Book, Bech Is Back, Bech at Bay)?

PureWow went with The Witches of Eastwick.

In a list-story on “The 50 Funniest Books We’ve Ever Read,”  they picked Updike’s tale of female vs. male power as their #6 funniest book: “The movie version is fabulous, but Updike’s original source material about three spurned women is even more satirical and wonderful.”

The bottom line is that there are a number of funny Updike books to choose from—enough for him to be considered not just one of America’s great writers, but one of America’s great comic writers as well.