If you read one long, serious, beautifully written book this winter, make it Toward the End of Time by John Updike. I finished it this evening, having chewed through it, like a hungry and purposeful mouse gnawing into a bank vault, these part couple of months. I was richly rewarded. Updike probes his way through male sensuality, botany, cosmology, eschatology and even ontology like a man in love with his memories, like a writer in love with words.