John Updike...WOW!!!!

I know he's been around for a long time but I have only now discovered John Updike. What a fantastic amazing talented writer! I aspire to write like him. I was paging thru a back issue of Atlantic Monthly and there was a short story called "Varieties of Religious Experience," by John Updike. It was all about 9/11 from the experience of the hijackers, someone in the twin towers, someone in one of the planes & someone watching from across the river. It was beautiful, mesmerizing, brilliant. So I checked a book of Updike's short stories out of the library called The Music Room, and I'm also reading Pigeon Feathers at the library whenever I have a few minutes to kill while I'm waiting for one of the kids. Characterization! All I can say is, if you want to be a writer, take a lesson from Updike & read his stuff. What else is out there that I'm missing?? I've read some Hemingway in the past 2 years & he just doesn't do it for me. Fitzgerald is marginally better. I've been reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems, which are beautiful & disturbing. I keep the book in my purse for when I have 5 minutes of downtime. I'm thinking of re-reading The Bell Jar. I read that one back in high school....lots of years ago. I still haven't picked up Seabiscuit or Devil in the White City, which Carla lent me over the summer. I'm in the middle of too many other things right now. I've been working only sporadically on my own short stories, one about Matilda & one about Carla in Catholic school. I've got to get more disciplined about that and write every day. But blogging counts as writing, doesn't it??