One sure indication of this FINE and immensely under-valued condition — Nerditude — will be your interest in turning to the On Second Thought section of the site. There, Your Nerdiness may find, for all your insomniac needs, an essay that I just completed for an undergrad English course in 20th-century American fiction. Hemingway. Anderson. Faulkner. Pynchon. Nabokov. Erdrich. Morrison. And among these greats was John Updike, of whose many novels I had somehow managed to read precisely none before this enforced novelizing. I read The Centaur, one of his least-known novels. Twice. And then I wrote about its depiction of a father and son.