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I discovered Rabbit Angstrom and John Updike while sitting in the Intensive Care Waiting Room at a local hospital. My mother languished in a coma for one month before she finally found peace, and I spent most of those days and many of my nights in that waiting room. During much of that time I'd blown through typical waiting room crap like books with plots about overthrowing the government, stories about detectives who were psychoanalysts, stories about psychoanalysts who were detectives, etc. One day during this siege, I stopped at my mother's house and was checking out her bookcases when I found a hardback copy of "Rabbit" and took it back to the hospital with me.
What a revelation. I was amazed. I couldn’t remember reading anything like it before. Honest true-to-life emotions of real everyday flawed people. And in the most beautiful and precise prose that I’d ever encountered. I immediately followed up reading this book with “Redux�, the only other Rabbit book published at the time. Since then I’ve easily read more pages of Updike than of any other writer.
My mother was a voracious reader, and a big public library patron. She bought relatively few books of the many that she'd read, so I always thought that there must have been some special significance to the books that she owned. I’ve always thought that my personal discovery of Updike’s work among her collection was special for that reason. (I also once found a paperback copy of “Tropic of Cancer� at her house � that still blows me away.)