I do loves me some John Updike. I think I read the whole Rabbit series back-to-back in a month or so. He was one helluva writer.
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I like the Rabbit books a great deal. Two Pulitzers awarded.
Exactly. I haven’t any insight as to how such things are chosen or singled out but what does seem to be consistent is the richness of characters and scenes. There aren’t that many writers gifted enough to bring characters and stories alive to the point of making them “real”. It’s quite an accomplishment.
My favorite is John Steinbeck. East of Eden. What an amazing work. Or his short story, Tortilla Flats.
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Speaking of Steinbeck, my most re-read book is Travels With Charlie.
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Not only are the characters “real,” they live on beyond the end of the book.
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That looks like an interesting read.
At the moment I’m splitting my time between Adin Dobkin’s “Sprinting Through No Man’s Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France” and rereading Thomas Tryon’s 1973 thriller “Harvest Home.”
That looks like an interesting story. A good friend was a field medic in Viet Nam and had some horrible stories to tell. I had the lottery ticket but never got called.
Lynda Van Devanter’s “Home Before Morning” is an outstanding example of nursing tales from the Vietnam war.
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I read “Home Before Morning” a few years ago and I think it’s a little more interesting than “When I Die” but I’m only 60% complete with this one.
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Some uncomfortable reading from a different P.O.V.
Some back story on the author, which leaves him uniquely qualified to discuss “collapses,” IMHO.
Martyanov graduated from a five-year program at a Soviet naval studying math and physics, military history and operations theory. He was serving as an officer when the Soviet collapse left him stranded in Azerbaijan, essentially as a stateless person. Martyanov subsequently emigrated to the U.S., taught math and physics and eventually went to work in the aerospace industry.
Spoiler alert: he has little use for any of our political class, regardless of party.
May not be to everyone’s liking, but sometimes I like to challenge my thinking.
“If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people, you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.” — Thomas Merton
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I assume you’ve seen the 2016 documentary “I called him Morgan?”
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