Quote of the Day from John Updike's Rabbit at Rest

I have been having a conversation over the last few days with my friend Rand Bellavia about what books and authors people read back in the 1980s. Rand asked, do young people still read John Updike and Philip Roth? 

I remember when Updike's book Rabbit at Rest was published in 1990. If you wanted to get a copy from your local suburban Detroit library then you had to wait in line. I also remember my boss at the time at the Wayne County Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped saying on a Monday morning to someone on the phone, "I won't tell you how late I was still in my jammies reading Rabbit at Rest yesterday." I read the book back then and enjoyed it. The language is poetic. I find the first paragraph, especially the first sentence extraordinary. Updike uses the incoming airplane as a metaphor for death.

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Soutwest Florida Regional airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.