I felt like everyone sharpened their knives on JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy I felt everyone sharpened their knives on that book. They embody four decades of the United States in writing so glittering and precise that it manages to overcome the consistently offensive views of the main character. The book that had the greatest influence on meĪs wildly unfashionable as they are, I learned more from reading the Rabbit Angstrom novels of John Updike than anything else. It’s an extraordinary novel – the structure, the characters, the sweep of time.