I couldn't put the book down for the last hundred some pages. So clever and interesting. I was and still am enthralled with three aged widow, witches. Trust Updike; he will bring the show. Lovely writing, character, meaning, and American literary tradition (and a bit of Hollywierd). Most las...
I first read the Witches of Eastwick back in the year 1984. This is the follow up book to that. The 3 witches EVENTUALLY get back together and travel to Eastwick for the summer. The witches are Jane (serious, mean, cello player who marries into a rich New England Nathaniel Hawthorne sort of fa...
This book grew on me as I read it. I'm still not sure it's 'necessary' - people weren't eager for a sequel, but it is nice to catch up with old friends and Sukie, Jane and Alexandra don't disappoint. Updike isn't entirely convincing when writing about women, but he's a hell of a lot better than...
MY FATHER’S TEARS, and other stories. (2009). John Updike. ****.John Updike passed away in 2009 so I have to assume that this would have been his last collection of short stories. He was a masterful short story writer. He didn’t employ any tricks; he was not an O’Henry or an Ambrose Bierce. ...
I have not read Updike before but this collection seems a rather transparent recollection of his own (short) stories. Here is a reminiscence of travel, of how ambivalent families and places can make one feels, of loves come and go, of id and ego in battles, of how memories can be grand and insign...
How amazing for Updike to have written 18 stories about the same couple, Richard and Joan Maple, over a 30 year period, returning time and again to what is effectively the portrait of a difficult and latterly disintegrating marriage. He could have written a novel instead, one supposes, but the st...
Wonderful little essay about baseball legend Ted Williams' last game. John Updike was there and later wrote a wonderful piece for the New Yorker. It was republished in a commemorative version last year. I'm not a big sports fan, but this is so well told. When I finished, I was angry all over agai...
My first Graham Greene novel was The End of the Affair and it rocked my world, and affected me in some profound ways. It was the perfect novel for me at the time, and I am forever indebted to Mr. Greene for giving me that enlightening experience.Going into this, I knew better than to expect the s...
Spoiler alert (esp. 3rd paragraph) Also, this book has some very *explicit* parts.This novel follows an intern, Roy G. Basch, for his internship year at a prestigious hospital nicknamed the “House of God.” Roy must deal with sickness of the elderly, the death of the young, the competition of hi...
i’ve been an atheist as long as i can remember and my life, in part, has been a feigned attempt toward belief. i will never believe and know this, so i scramble toward god as a tightrope walker over a net of godlessness. the point, i guess, is to get as close as possible to something i know i’ll ...
I’m honestly a bit surprised that I picked this up. To my prejudices it was the jejune, possibly self-caricatural big bestseller, the book whose fame caused every obituary writer to narrowly cast Updike as a chronicler of upper-middle class New England marriages (Rabbit is a Pennsylvanian petit-b...
Кондо во Флориде, внуки, отход от бизнеса, хобби в виде чтения толстой исторической книги... Кажется, Кролик действительно перестал бежать и примирился с жизнью. Жизнь стала предсказуемой, чуть скучноватой, но удобной как старые домашние тапочки. Но расслабиться и наслаждаться ей не получается, р...
June 8 2015, Update: 186. That is the page I got to when I gave up. Why, you ask? Because that is the page on which the protagonist describes his fantasy of giving himself a blowjob, describing the different fluids involved. Disgusted, I decided it was not worth reading through this to see what t...
The Old Man in the Woods Or The Monkeys by fire We monkeys have sat by this ever-burning fire for generations because we are simply afraid to go outside the perimeter of its light into the dark. Although we have tried to look beyond into the darkness everyday hoping to find something; ye...
It is a tour-de-force, a novel that telescopes 80 years of American history through the lives of four characters. A Presbyterian minister who loses his faith. A young man who fears the world and so settles for the routine of mail delivery. A Hollywood star. A joiner of a religious cult. What conn...
"Bech at Bay" is the last of Updike's Bech trilogy, tales of the life of his libidinous "Jewish" author-persona.After three books, I still have not accepted Bech as a genuine, successfully-realized literary character, much less an authentic Jewish author. I'm still not sure why Updike chose to em...
Revisiting this work after more than a decade since my first unsatisfying time through, I have reassessed it. I previously rejected it as dull, uninteresting stories about a character about whom I could care less. This time through I found it a pleasant if mostly uninspiring read, a nice perio...
www.emergenthermit.comDivinity professor, Roger Lambert, seems to have a great deal of problems. Being hassled and annoyed by a young science-minded evangelical student named Dale about a grant for a project involving the proof of God’s existence is a minor inconvenience on the scale. It would se...
”It must be terrible to know so much.”A pause.“It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.” Chiron depicted in Roman art. The Greeks always depicted him with human front legs. Chiron educated the children of the gods and goddesses so he is an apt mythological creature for George Caldwell to identify wit...
Read Summer 2010; Re-read January 2011Summary: Wickedly entertaining. The Witches of Eastwick is about three divorced women in the New England town of Eastwick who discover that after being abandoned or divorced from their husbands, they have supernatural powers. Alexandra Spoffard, the sculptres...
I confess I haven't read much of John Updike's work. About thirty years ago I flipped through "Couples" for the prurient interest it sparked at its publication. I laughed through "The Witches of Eastwick"--the movie, not the book. But I never read any of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom novels. My we...
When John Updike recently passed away, he wrote a poem suggesting that the world would forget him.After his life, I read the Afterlife and found that despite death, the human echo can be as meaningful as the words spoke when the voice was alive. (barf).Regardless, Updike crafts a short story coll...
Loving by Henry Green is about the goings-on between the servants and masters in a castle in Ireland during WWII. It's a pretty simple tale, but there isn't much plot. There's a sort of love triangle between the butler, Charlie, his "man" (aka assistant) Albert, and a chamber maid, Edith, a missi...
FIRST LINE REVIEW: "Set together, the two words are seen to be mutually transparent; the e's, the m's blend -- the m's framing and squaring the structure lend resonance and a curious formal weight to the m central in the creature, which it dominates like a dark core winged with flitting syllables...
This is one of the best short story collections I have read in a long while. "It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a classroom where they would never be recognized, or in a charade that would never be guessed, the correct answer being Two Silver Birches in a Meadow.""All my life peo...
A year ago I vowed to myself (and you, if you had read my review of Rabbit, Run) that I’d read a Rabbit novel annually until I’m done with the four-novel series; the idea being that I could look back and see how I’d changed in the past year, comparing the changes in my life with those incurred by...
I wasn't actually planning to read this all the way through: I borrowed it from the library just to have a flick through it. However, I then came across Updike's comment in the introduction that only a ''chairbound agoraphobe'' would be able to read it cover-to-cover: well, that sounded like a ch...
Despite its seeming brevity this is by no means a book to wolf down but rather is one to savour. The stories do tend towards the shorter end of the market, so consuming one per sitting is quite do-able and rewarding. Initially I was a little resistant to the prose - it made me work harder than ...
having finished the third Rabbit book I can tell you that john updike thinks a lot about blowjobs. a lot. and i don’t think it’s just that he’s a horny bastard obsessed with facefucking bookish young gals (which he is, of course) -- it's also that the blowjob mirrors other currents in society. i ...
when extolling the virtues of capitalism -- “the worst economic system, except for all the others” -- to the commies, pinkos, marxists, fags, and anti-americans i pal around with, my favorite defense was formerly the fool-proof statement that ‘nobody washes a rented car’. the final section of the...
This short novel serves as a prolegomenon to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an interpretation and distillation of three distinct historical documents covering the lives and events that lead up to the play’s first scene. Updike does not deal with the matter in his usual lapidary fashion, giving vital shap...
It's been at least a decade since I've read Marry Me, but I'll give it a whirl...In the next-to-last chapter, Jerry (like the prodigal he is) returns home. Courtly love/romance has ended appropriately; knowing what to expect with Ruth and maintaining his house--in cards, a marriage--have trumped...
tJohn Updike is a master short story writer, and there are several gems in “Trust Me: Short Stories” a 1987 collection of stories from 1962 to 1987, most having appeared in The New Yorker.tI had read only one story before: “Unstuck” which originally ran in the Feb. 3, 1962, The New Yorker. It is ...
The blurb on the back of this edition describes the book as "the triumphant story of postwar American art." I don't know if that's how Updike intended it, but as he presents it, there was nothing triumphant about it...just a boys' club of self-important, pretentious freaks, many of whom had litt...
