Episode 98 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, recaps the second installment of our book club, on Couples, a 1968 novel by John Updike.
Even though it came recommended as a “best tennis book,” Couples didn’t turn out to have much tennis in it at all. We talk about whether the brief bits of tennis in the book swing above their weight, why Updike would have his characters (occasionally) play tennis instead of other sports, and why tennis seems to be underrepresented in fiction.
It’s not Updike’s best work, and like our last book club pick–Gordon Forbes’s memoir A Handful of Summers–it’s very much of its time, but it gives the reader (tennis-focused and otherwise) plenty to think about.
Thanks for listening!
(Note: this week’s episode is about 50 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)
Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.
Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba
Podcast housekeeping:
- The TAP book club soldiers on with Arthur Ashe’s memoir, Days of Grace. I’ll post more about that book tomorrow, and we’ll plan to talk about it in a podcast episode next month.
- In case you haven’t heard, I’m 30-plus episodes into a short (~4 minute) daily podcast called Expected Points. Here’s today’s episode.
- To celebrate our upcoming 100th episode, Carl and I want you to tell us what to talk about. Send us questions, comments, topics, whatever (either in the comments section of this post or on Twitter) and we’ll get to as many of them as we can.
