Updike's Rabbit books are some of my favorite novels. Oddly enough, I just reread Witches a few months ago--it's great fun.

I have been trying to read as many non-western works as possible, before the demands of the Montana Festival of the Book require my full attention. From April through September I'll be trying to keep up with the new works by our invited authors. (violins, please.) So, I've just finished Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union; Amy Bloom's Away; and Anne Patchett's Run--all wildly different, both from each other and from the "literature of the west." I liked some more than others (loved the Chabon and Murakami) but all of them did, for me, what I want from a novel--immersion in the other, intimate contact with another way of thinking/another culture, an empathic experience. I'm about to go on vacation, and am enjoying the process of choosing which books to bring with me.