https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/03/david-baddiel-i-dont-really-have-shame-as-an-emotion

The writer and comedian on admiring John Updike, crying over Station Eleven and laughing at Alan Partridge

The book I am currently reading
I’m listening to À la recherche du temps perdu on audiobook. I find it helps with the hoovering. I’m also rereading Roger’s Version by John Updike, which – as well as being about adultery, as per – is also about religion and physics, similar to my play God’s Dice. It’s slightly frightening, considering I last read it in the 80s, how much it subconsciously influenced that play.

The book that changed my life
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike – there’s going to be a lot of Updike. He and his fellow Great Male Narcissists, as David Foster Wallace called him and Bellow and Roth and Mailer, are very out of fashion, but important cultural correction away from their misogyny though that was and is, he’s just too good a prose writer for me to say anything else. When I read Rabbit Is Rich – the greatest of the Rabbit books – I began to understand entirely how the job of art, as Updike puts it, is “to give the mundane its beautiful due”. Of course he got that – a bit – from Proust.