{"id":3261,"date":"2016-01-27T08:34:42","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T14:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=3261"},"modified":"2016-01-27T08:34:42","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T14:34:42","slug":"writer-summarizes-his-year-spent-reading-updike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2016\/01\/27\/writer-summarizes-his-year-spent-reading-updike\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer summarizes his year spent reading Updike"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday The Christian Science Monitor<\/em> printed a piece titled “My ‘Updike year’\u2014why I appreciate the man more now than ever”<\/a> in its Books\/Chapter & Verse section. In it, Danny Heitman<\/strong> writes that he had made it a point\u00a0to read as many of John Updike’s books as he could in 2015, but, being a slow reader, he “managed to read only a fraction of the Updike canon, poking around mostly in the personal essays and criticism collected in a half a dozen volumes, including Odd Jobs<\/em>, Hugging the Shore<\/em> and Picked-up Pieces<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

About the experience, he writes, “What I remember most vividly from my year of Updike isn’t a particular subject or turn of phrase; he wrote about everything from baseball to cemeteries to the postal service with precision, wit, and a mastery of language that defies easy summary. No, the most abiding memory of my Updike year is the heroic moderation of the man\u2014his quiet insistence on teasing out an insight with subtlety and grace, never raising his voice. . . .<\/p>\n

“That voice continues to be a tonic for me as I negotiate the noise of the headlines, the extremism of the political culture, the venom-tinged pronouncements of the Twittersphere. Updike’s been gone for seven years now, but his work endures, and we need it now more than ever.”<\/p>\n

Heitman is a columnist for The Advocate<\/em> newspaper in Louisiana and the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday The Christian Science Monitor printed a piece titled “My ‘Updike year’\u2014why I appreciate the man more now than ever” in its Books\/Chapter & Verse section. In it, Danny Heitman writes that he had made it a point\u00a0to read as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person-singular"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3262,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions\/3262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}