John Updike died today.
When I heard the news, I was transported back some 30 years to a small classroom at Case Western Reserve University. The building was so old that the afternoon sun shone on hardwood floors as Updike read his poetry to a tiny audience.
The writer was on campus to see an old friend, a professor at CWRU. I don't know why he read only poems that day, and not selections from his better-known novels or essays. Although I saw in the Times obituary that John Updike was a tall man, I remember his features as rather elven, his eyes twinkling, his skin flushed and rough with psoriasis. For a famous writer, he seemed shy and profoundly pleased by our response to his work.
I vividly recall Updike's tender reading of his poem "Dog's Death." This prosaic account of the sudden loss of the family puppy contained one hauntingly luminous line:
John Updike
Favorite Books, 2008 Edition
Our books reflect who we are and who we have been . . .
Alberto Manguel
The Library at Night
The books that I loved most last year (listed in the order in which I read them) fell into one or more of the following categories:
A. They were peopled with characters ranging from mildly quirky to wildly eccentric.
B. They generated in me a mix of admiration and pure envy at the author's ability to turn a phrase.
She concentrated her separate thoughts darkly, because if anyone was expecting her to become the wind beneath their wings, they could jolly well look ahead to a fiery crash, no survivors.
Nancy Clark
The Hills at Home
C. They made me snort with laughter.
D. (Mildly embarrassing) They were non-fiction "dog books."
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer)
- The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett)
- One Good Turn (Kate Atkinson)
- The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Michael Chabon)
- Good Dog. Stay (Anna Quindlen)
- The Used World (Haven Kimmel)
- Grace (Eventually) (Anne Lamott)
- Forward From Here (Reeve Lindbergh)
- Wit's End (Karen Joy Fowler)
- The Monsters of Templeton (Lauren Groff)
- Dog Years (Mark Doty)
- The Library at Night (Alberto Manguel)
- July and August (Nancy Clark)
- The Hills at Home (Nancy Clark)
- Woof! Writers on Dogs (ed. Lee Montgomery)
As it was, they would often come upon her in odd unfrequented corners of her various dwellings, spectacles on the end of her nose, notebook and pencil beside her. [The Queen] would glance up briefly and raise a vague, acknowledging hand. 'Well, I'm glad somebody's happy,' said the duke as he shuffled off down the corridor. And it was true; she was. She enjoyed reading like nothing else . . .
Alan Bennett
The Uncommon Reader
Best Fictional Halloween Costume
" . . . I went out as a chicken pot pie. Mama wrapped me all up in silver foil and she stuck feathers in my hair and hung a carrot and a celery from my ears and she wrote 'Heat at three thousand degrees for twelve hours' across my forehead. You know, I'm real lucky I didn't run into one of those psychopaths because I think he would have had a defense . . . "
Nancy Clark
The Hills at Home
The Tattered Cover
He has been thirsting for books, for anything to read. He has long ago finished The Riddle of the Sands, which he brought with him into NEFA, and has been reduced to reading the labels on bottles of medicine, the fine print at the bottom of army requisition forms, and as even these have run out he has started to experience a kind of panic, as if he is slowly drowning.
Vikram Chandra
from Sacred Games
