John Updike
1) Rabbit, run
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.9 - AR Pts: 16
Lexile measure
900L
Language
English
Description
"Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his--or any other--generation. Its hero is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a one time high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty--even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine grace....
2) Terrorist
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.7 - AR Pts: 17
Language
English
Description
Ahmad, threatened by the hedonistic society around him, gets involved in a plot, with reverberations that rouse the Department of Homeland Security.
3) Seek my face
Author
Language
English
Description
During an interview with a New York writer, seventy-nine-year-old artist Hope Chafetz describes her eventful life and her integral place in the saga of postwar American art.
Author
Pub. Date
1996.
Language
English
Description
John Updike's seventeenth novel begins in 1910, and traces God's relation to four generations of an American family, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith, and becomes an encyclopedia salesman and a motion-picture addict. The remainder of Clarence's family moves to the small town of Basingstoke, Delaware, where his cautious son, Teddy, becomes a mailman. Faithless himself, Teddy marries...
6) Villages
Author
Language
English
Description
Seventy-year-old Owen Mackenzie does what people his age often do: he dwells on the past. For Owen, this means he obsessively recollects the places he's lived and how these locations functioned as settings for what the women in his life--his mother, two wives, and assorted lovers--gave him. He feels that these females are what provided life to his life, the material of his true existence, which, in this remembrance, he stretches like a canvas on the...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.6 - AR Pts: 28
Lexile measure
1100L
Language
English
Description
The protagonist of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless,...
8) The coup
Author
Language
English
Description
Updike presents the story of a fictitious modern African state called Kush, narrated tongue-in-cheek by Kush's exiled president, Colonel Felix Ellellou.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2008.
Language
English
Description
Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, all now widowed, return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick after many years away and find themselves dealing with the legacy of their evil deeds, the shocks of a mysterious counterspell, and the inroads of aging.
11) S
Author
Language
English
Description
New Englander Sarah Worth goes west to join a Hindu commune in Arizona. There she mingles with the other sannyasins (pilgrims) in the difficult attempt to subdue ego and achieve salvation and release from illusion.
14) Rabbit at rest
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1990.
Lexile measure
1120L
Language
English
Description
"Ex-basketball player Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live."
16) Couples
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1968.
Language
English
Description
Follows the lives of a group of couples in an upperclass Boston suburb through their parties, recreations, child neglect, and wife-swapping.
Author
Publisher
Knopf
Pub. Date
1993.
Language
English
Description
"The idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise - the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control. In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux." Thus John...