Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

John Updike was an extraordinarily intelligent and perceptive reader, as evidenced by his long tenure as a fiction reviewer in The New Yorker (online here), many of which are included in this collection of reviews and essays. His reading choices were highly eclectic, including a number of foreign authors, and his essays are uniformly smart, casual, and enthusiastic — but never condescending or arrogant. They are written with the interests of the reader in mind (so rare for book reviews), and the introduction to the book includes a still-valuable “code of reviewing” set of guidelines for book reviewers. Highly recommended.