Brian Hoey, a self-described “book nerd,” yesterday uploaded a piece for www.BooksTellYouWhy.com titled “Sex, Trash, and Eminem: Five Interesting Facts About John Updike,” one of which—that he couldn’t write sex scenes—is debatable.

But one “fact” may be new to the larger community of Updike readers and scholars:

4) His influence extends beyond Literature and into Rap Music.

“Or, at least, Eminem has read the firRabbitIsRichst installment in Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ tetrology, Rabbit, Run (1960). The noted rapper was, apparently, so moved as to nickname the protagonist in his 2002 film 8 Mile ‘Rabbit,’ laying claim to a revitalization of the white-American-everyman archetype that Updike so forcefully established five decades ago. The film’s soundtrack, too, referenced Updike’s contribution to the canon with a track entitled ‘Rabbit Run,’ for those who might have missed the first reference.”

Mother’s Day is approaching and The Irish Times today ran a piece by literary correspondent Eileen Battersby.

In “Eileen Battersby picks her favorite fictional mums for Mother’s Day,” the journalist names John Steinbeck’s Ma Joad (The Grapes of Wrath) as one of her favorites. She also cites moms who appeared in fiction by James Stephen, Virginia Woolf, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Wolfe, Tim Winton, Paul Smith, Toni Morrison, Harriette Arrow, William Maxwell, Bertolt Brecht, Sun-Mi Hwang, and John Updike.

Which mom could it possible be from the Updike canon, you wonder? Certainly not Ma Springer or Harry’s mom, and of course Janice is a big no. The mothers from The Witches of Eastwick were hardly moms at all. The mom from Of the Farm? Close.

Battersby admires the mother remembered in Updike’s prize-winning short story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” which was republished in The Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (1995).

“In this wonderful story, among his finest, the great Updike describes a middle-aged man, Joey, remembering his mother at various stages of her life. It is a story about his mother, and about every mother, because every mother was also once a very different person. At the heart of the story is the mother’s determination to move her family, her parents as well as her son, to the family home she set out to restore. It is about how a mother returned to her family home and sustained it was the place where both her vital years and her old age were spent.”

Pictured is Ma Joad from John Ford’s film version of Steinbeck’s Dustbowl novel, who gets one of the film’s best lines:  “Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t like us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”

Paste Magazine today featured a booklist post from Tyler Kane on “8 Entertaining Math-Inspired Reads for Pi Day.”

Topping the list was An Abundance of Katherines by John Green, better known for The Fault in Our Stars. Right behind him was John Cheever’s The Geometry of Love, followed by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein, John Updike’s Problems, and Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatist.

Of Problems, Kane writes, “Abandoning your family is as easy as simple math in John Updike’s bummer tale of domestic frustration. You’re treated to pages of a logic puzzle, dealing with the causes and effects that occur when A, B and C interact. Here, we see our main character juggling laundry, his children’s expenses and psychiatric visits—all in a new life with a younger woman. The worst part? This all looks easier on paper.”