- Description
A conversation with author John Updike
- Keywords:
- Villages
- Pulitzer Prize
- National Book Award
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CarolJ 11/13/2008 02:23 PM Report
To Charlie & web staff. I will get use to this new look eventually, but I miss the home page showing the most recent comments. This is how I watched some of your old programs and learned about people and things I never heard of before.
REMant 11/13/2008 11:16 AM Report
The latest book should be entitled Wabbit Won, obviously. I have never been able to read one of his novels. Nor for that matter any of Michael Crichton's. In fact, I almost never read novels. I find most novels simplistic and/or overwrought, and boring, only interesting for their historical or philosophical value, as, for instance, Austen's. She is popular, but, it seems, mostly misunderstood. I used to read murder mysteries, etc, but always guessed who done it before they were half over, and I've already read all the good ones anyway. Novelists come in a few different shapes. With some the tale is only there to illustrate a moral, as with Austen, and it is not so different from expository writing. They are cognitively oriented and you see this almost exclusively in work done prior to the 19th c. Others seem to have in mind a history of redemption, and write the kind of things that end up as mini-series, like The Winds of War. I don't believe in theories of progress, or the idea that ppl in the past were really different from ppl today. Quite the opposite. It seems to me that writers a couple centuries ago were better able to get to the point and stick to it, and it is rule of mine that if you want to get the best view of a question, go back as close to the time when it first surfaced to read about it. This subject always reminds me of Mr Chips, sent packing during The Great War for daring to think that history was meant to be taught so that lessons might be drawn. Still other authors seem to need to use situations in order to think through what most would reduce to concept, and I suspect a deficiency in cognition. I would think they are hide-bound or even obsessive, but are probably the most prolific.