Rabbit Is Repulsive

[purejuice]

Fearful of losing his scholarship [at Harvard], [John Updike] fretted before every exam and duly recorded the results, even on quizzes, in his letters home. “I seem to be somewhat of a grind,” he wrote in an early letter, adding, “This surprises no one more than it does me.” Since he planned to be a writer, he majored in English to force himself to read classic literature. (His own taste ran to James Thurber.) And though he wanted to master French, he dropped it when he discovered he had little aptitude for languages. He finished ninth in his class but was chagrined when two of his oral examiners, noting his weak grasp of classical literature, hesitated before awarding him summa cum laude distinction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/books/21updike.html?pagewanted=2&sq=updike&st=cse&scp=2

I mean, aside from Updike's relentless sniggery misogynism and unrelentingly nasty suburban downlow sex, says here Harvard thought Updike had no aptitude for language? And the NYT asserts, after examining some of the 170-carton archive His Holiness left Harvard, that Updike's literary go-to guy was that 20th century style titan, James Thurber?

Nobody I know, much less the writers I know, was so callow or frivolous at 18 to prefer Thurber. My teenage years, and those of everybody I know who reads, were the Magellan years of reading, true epic courage and stamina. My go-to guys at 18 were Patrick Dennis, Hardy, and Lawrence Durrell and I'm sure yours were equally hi lo, like Seventeen magazine, Exupery and Steinbeck.

Steinbeck! I read in the TLS a while back his rep is on the rise. Good.

Comments

[atthesametime.livejournal.com]

My teenage years, and those of everybody I know who reads, were the Magellan years of reading, true epic courage and stamina.

So true. I will never read as much serious fiction with as much gusto as I did in my late teens and early twenties. Then I wanted nothing more to read and understand Gravity's Rainbow, now I want to read a Henning Mankell mystery.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

you should write about that. i always get the sense when you write about reading -- it's one of the central pieces of furniture in my mind -- of the enormous peace and pleasure of sitting alone in a beautiful day-lit room, moving forward through the universe as if on a great ship, reading a book with a slight breeze moving one's hair.
gravity's rainbow, like the wiki entry is almost too much for me now. as is henning mankell. but i'll try. the mankell, anyway.
i can still read footnotes of the annotated bible, however, and weird excel tables of indian mortality stats, which is proof of -- some kind of twistedness.

[microbie.livejournal.com]

proof of genius, I'm sure of it. :)

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

twist!

[the-sikh-geek.livejournal.com]

My sophomore year of college, 19 and alone during a year abroad in France, I would read about 300 pages a day. I was a machine.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

the book machine!
did you learn french? i'm so jealous.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

At 18 I was reading a combo of Big Swingin' Euro Dick authors like Dostoyevsky, Joyce, and Tolstoy, plus an array of Extruded Fantasy Product so unremarkable that in later years I have occasionally picked up a genre book I didn't think I'd read only to realize after 4 pages that indeed I had.

One thing I'm looking forward to about finishing the Grand Unified Field Theory is that I'll get to read fiction again. I have some friends who write very enjoyable fiction, I miss reading them.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

it's hard to read fiction when i'm writing. i am enjoying more BBC -- Our Mutual Friend -- on netflix.

[dcart.livejournal.com]

Yep. At 18, I was a 50/50 mix of the heavyweights and Robert Ludlum. :)

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

that sounds perfectly nutritious.

[uberconfused.livejournal.com]

At 18 I was reading anything and everything written by Nabokov or Martin Amis (plus the Joyce, Woolf, Robbe-Grillet, etc that was assigned in Moretti's class), until I discovered Catherine MacKinnon and then it was nothing but feminist texts for many, many years.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

nabokov, i loh heem. i'll have to try martin amis again tho kingsley is kind of a gas.

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

At 18 for me it was Jimmy Breslin, George Orwell, and Greil Marcus. Have mercy.

Updike never did much for me, but I was wary about post-war fiction for a long time. The King Dick school of great white hopes - Updike, Bellow, Mailer, Roth - still seem a little mundane in their preoccupations. Give me Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Joyce Carol Oates any day.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

i think they're mundane too, and it strikes me as interesting! that you pick chick lit of the mary shelley frankenstein school as its antidote. bwahahahahaha!
there's a second wave feminist tome called The Madwoman in the Attic or something of the kind which, as i recall, chases down every good idea about frankenstein -- whose grandma was mary wollstonecraft, the rights of woman woman. he is a feminist.
but you knew that.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

and, go jimmy breslin! i recently was spelunking around and read his jfk gravedigger piece. oh!