Bech

Many writers go deep, many writers write well. [a:John Updike|6878|John Updike|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419249254p2/6878.jpg] could do both, which makes his books, to me, always worth reading.
[b:Bech: A Book|213701|Bech A Book|John Updike|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1359257871l/213701.SY75.jpg|206873] came with some confusion. Was it or was it not a sequel? It turns out it's a compendium of short pieces Updike had published before and it stands on its own as a novel.
[a:Elmore Leonard|12940|Elmore Leonard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1240015224p2/12940.jpg] once had ten rules for writers. They are:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

It turns out Leonard broke the one about exclamation points himself, but I like the rules anyway. I mention this because I'd add one that sort of goes with the second, "Avoid prologues," which would be not to have an appendix for fictional works. Updike added one to the first section of Beck: A Book and it makes reading that section awful. No matter how good the appendix may be, fumbling with turning pages back and forth takes you out of the story and makes you feel like you're studying something. You wonder if you could do without reading the appendix or read it later, but then you have doubts about whether or not you're going to miss something so you read it. There're just two of them and I guess they might add something to it if you're big on knowing everything about the literary world of the sixties and seventies, but I hated them and it soured my attitude toward the rest of the book more than it should have. You might be an exception to this.
Here's a part where Bech, a writer in his forties, is eating with students at an all women's college in the South where he's been a guest speaker for a few days:

He looked around the ring of munching females and saw their bodies as a Martian or a mollusc might see them, as pulpy stalks of bundled nerves oddly pinched to a bud of concentration in the head, a hairy bone knob holding some pounds of jelly in which a trillion circuits, mostly dead, kept records, coded motor operations, and generated an excess of electricity that pressed into the hairless side of the head and leaked through the orifices, in the form of pained, hopeful noises and a simian dance of wrinkles. Impossible mirage! A blot on nothingness. And to think that all the efforts of his life—boiled down to the attempt to displace a few sparks, to bias a few circuits, within some random other scoops of jelly that would, in less time than it takes the Andreas Fault to shrug or the tail-tip star of Scorpio to crawl an inch across the map of Heaven, be utterly dissolved. The widest fame and most enduring excellence shrank to nothing in this perspective.