I must take a moment to say farewell to John Updike, the author of the magnificent Rabbit tetralogy, who has died from cancer aged 76.

I'm pretty sure he appeared at the Hay Festival a few years ago and I'm sorry I missed his talk.

I have started to read the Rabbit books backwards, beginning with Rabbit at Rest published in 1990, which won the author the Pulitzer Prize.

I have also read something of Rabbit Run, the first novel, and Rabbit is Rich, the third, and I shall now revisit the series to get a proper overview of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's life story.

There was one coupling too many in Couples for me, but I love the Early Stories 1953-1975, and return to the collection from time to time.

There are plenty of obituaries in the nationals, and one of Updike's quotes stood out when he was discussing his work in the 1950s.

He told an interviewer: "When I write, I aim in my mind not towards New York but towards a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

"I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish teenaged boy finding them and having them speak to him."

Although Updike wrote for the New Yorker magazine he was keen for his writing to connect with ordinary people and that was part of the reason for him leaving Manhattan in 1957 to relocate to the coastal mill town of Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Before that, in the mid-1950s, he spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, which children's illustrator Shirley Hughes also attended.

I bet there are some great photos of Updike in Oxford somewhere, perhaps sinking a pint in the King's Arms, or Eagle and Child, or maybe even having a punt along the river. Unfortunately, there was nothing in the Oxford Mail's library when I enquired.

While I mourn the passing of John Updike, I have also been upset by the demise of the Books supplement in The Times on Saturday.

The eminently readable pull-out has now been subsumed into a rather unwieldy broadsheet arts review. I'm not going to cancel my subscription, but I do feel a little bit short-changed.

Another book on my reading list at the moment is Melvyn Bragg's Remember Me, which is partly set in Oxford during the 1960s, and if I play my cards right I might even get the chance to have a chat with him.