{"id":5540,"date":"2022-06-20T13:47:52","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T18:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=5540"},"modified":"2022-06-20T13:47:53","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T18:47:53","slug":"retiring-book-critic-names-his-top-20-memorable-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2022\/06\/20\/retiring-book-critic-names-his-top-20-memorable-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Retiring book critic names his Top 20 memorable books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When you’ve been a book critic as long as Craig Brown <\/strong>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.” <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Click on the link above to read his farewell remarks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the “20 Most Memorable Books I’ve Reviewed,” here they are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waterlog<\/em>\u2014Roger Deakin
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher<\/em>\u2014Kate Summerscale
Birds and People<\/em>\u2014Mark Cocker
Once Upon a Secret<\/em>\u2014Mimi Alford
Madeleine<\/em>\u2014Kate McCann
A Very English Scandal<\/em>\u2014John Preston
This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood<\/em>\u2014Alan Johnson
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power<\/em>\u2014Robert A. Caro
Out of Sheer Rage<\/em>\u2014Geoff Dyer
Untold Stories<\/em>\u2014Alan Bennett
Simon Gray’s Diaries<\/em>\u2014Simon Gray
Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools, 1939-1979<\/em>\u2014Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Tamara Drewe<\/em>\u2014Posy Simmonds
The Man Who Went into the West<\/em>\u2014Byron Rogers
The Examined Life<\/em>\u2014Stephen Grosz
The Year of Magical Thinking<\/em>\u2014Joan Didion
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film<\/em>\u2014David Thomson
Anne Tyler’s Novels\u2014yes, any of them
Tales of a New Jerusalem<\/em>\u2014David Kynaston
Endpoint and Other Poems<\/em>\u2014John Updike<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“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.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n


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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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lists","category-updike-in-context"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540","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\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5543,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5540\/revisions\/5543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}