#6

I'd planned about seven years ago to read Updike's Rabbit novels, but bumped into a skewering of the project by Gore Vidal that convinced me to push them off. Despite Vidal's criticisms I enjoyed Rabbit, Run. The characters are finely wrought, the banal and mundane existence of the hero is made to scintillate through authorial ingenuity, and the Molly Bloom-style moment of tragedy is quite effectively handled.

Plus, I'm a small-town PA boy myself, and I recognize the landscape, the characters, the worldview. On to the next three in the series.