What Book Are You Currently Reading ?

[Beanz]

I have now started this huge omnibus which I bought, like many of my books from a charity shop for a £1.




I must have got it a year ago and have finally now got around to reading my first John Updike. I don't know if the American guys here would see him as one of the quintessential modern American novelists but I have been bowled over by the quality of the prose. By page 8 my mouth was almost hanging open with the succinctness and beauty of his phrasing. It is really good stuff, so much so that it has inspired me to design some original artwork on which I will shortly be working. I hope to travel to the States one day but would like to do so with enough spare money and free time to create and exhibit some art over there and this just whets the appetite. It is full of little dramas lived out in front of epic backdrops.

I am now just starting the third book in the omnibus "Rabbit is Rich" and have to say I am still blown away. The characters are presented with none of the rough corners knocked off, and the plot is pretty incidental, but the eye and descriptive power of Updike just never wanes. Quality Read.

I have now finished this trilogy, thinking that was it for Harry Angstrom. If it were it would still make perfect sense finishing as it did, but no there is a fourth and final book in the tetralogy "Rabbit at Rest" which I have ordered online. Then there is a short novella "Rabbitt Remembered" which is included in the short story collection "Licks of Love", where he is remembered by people from his life. I don't know whether that should be included to make a pentalogy but I think probably not. Anyway I only found this out today which was a nice surprise. I bought the short story collection second hand from a hospices charity shop online which concludes a nice synergy initiated with the original trilogy omnibus being bought in person at a hospice charity shop. I can see why he got the Pulitzer and was also interested to find that he wrote a lot of art criticism too which I will read at some point.