One of my favorite non-fiction writers writing about his obsession with one of my favorite writers of everything!  Baker hasn’t tried to read all of Updike nor has he met him except for two brief encounters at social events, but that doesn’t stop him from writing 179 pages about Updike as a writer, person, and friend in what Baker calls a new form of literary criticism, memory crit or closed book examination.  Baker’s incredible skill as a wordsmith is in evidence as he goes off on self-conscious asides and entire chapters about tangents.  Harold Bloom makes several cameo appearances via his 1973 Anxiety of Influence.  Baker’s image of the vast dying sea of past readings is worth the price of admission alone, as follows:  “a character leans his forehead against a bookcase and considers “all the poetry he had once read evaporating in him, a vast dying sea.”  Baker goes on to observe this moment’s ‘own plucky ability to stay afloat…as the rest of the story and almost all literature capsizes and decays in deep corrosive oceans of totaled recall.”   Baker decides that it is this vast dying sea of the ‘once read’ that is “the most important feature of all reading lives!  And its symbol is the random detail—the plaid blanket in Portrait of a Lady, the picnic basket with a single jar of honey from Anna Karenina, the aquamarine bowl from Pnin.