What are you reading now?

[pastoralguy]

I've been re-reading one of my favourite books, John Fowles' 'The Magus'. I first read this book in my early 20's which I think is a good time to discover this work. I read it again in my 30's and 40's and found that although I still enjoyed it, I was a little less susceptible to its charms. Now that I'm in my mid 50's I find that parts of it grate somewhat although the 'set pieces' are still very good. I suspect I'm much less able to identify with the main character as I get older.

I know it's been discussed in rather disparaging terms in this thread although I can't find those entrys now. I wonder how others feel.

[Conchis]

I've been re-reading one of my favourite books, John Fowles' 'The Magus'. I first read this book in my early 20's which I think is a good time to discover this work. I read it again in my 30's and 40's and found that although I still enjoyed it, I was a little less susceptible to its charms. Now that I'm in my mid 50's I find that parts of it grate somewhat although the 'set pieces' are still very good. I suspect I'm much less able to identify with the main character as I get older.

I know it's been discussed in rather disparaging terms in this thread although I can't find those entrys now. I wonder how others feel.

I’ve only read it once, back in my early twenties but it made a big impression on me (obviously!).

It’s probably a good thing that you ‘identify less’ with Nicholas now: Fowles’ genius in creating the character was to present artistically-inclined young folk with a (not totally) flattering mirror image of themselves. Nicholas is egocentric and insufferable and easily the least sympathetic major character in the novel (he richly deserves the intellectual evisceration he receives from Conchis, Julie, etc as well as the purely verbal assault from Kemp at the end) but he’s also highly relatable to the adolescent and post-adolescent reader.

Fowles can take some of the blame for the dreadful film version, as he had a hand in the screenplay. I would have loved to have seen a remake with (say) Jude Law and Ben Kingsley, but I think the moment has passed.

If you’re interested in the book’s tortured and protracted gestation period, I’d highly recommend John Fowles’ Journals (both volumes) which upset a lot of people when they were published due to their alleged ‘anti-semitism’. They offer a fascinating insight into Fowles’ the man as well as the artist: he spared himself nothing!

[Mal]

I've been re-reading one of my favourite books, John Fowles' 'The Magus'. I first read this book in my early 20's which I think is a good time to discover this work. I read it again in my 30's and 40's and found that although I still enjoyed it, I was a little less susceptible to its charms. Now that I'm in my mid 50's I find that parts of it grate somewhat although the 'set pieces' are still very good. I suspect I'm much less able to identify with the main character as I get older.

I'm about the same age as you and read this for the first time a few months ago. I enjoyed The French Lieutenants Woman, and The Collector, in my 20s, and always intended to read this "sometime"; the reviews on its release were mixed, which is why I didn't rush to read it. These days, I don't read novels in full unless they grip me within 50 pages, and I did finish this one, but I was getting very weary by the end. My grip became looser as I read on and by the end I wish I hadn't started! He writes well, he's a storyteller, but I found the incidents rather silly, repetitive, and drawn out. The big test of a novel is will I re-read it and the answer is no... but I will probably re-read The French Lieutenant's Woman.

[LMcD]

I've just started Philip Kerr's 'Berlin Noir'

[Richard Barrett]

I've been re-reading one of my favourite books, John Fowles' 'The Magus'. I first read this book in my early 20's which I think is a good time to discover this work. I read it again in my 30's and 40's and found that although I still enjoyed it, I was a little less susceptible to its charms. Now that I'm in my mid 50's I find that parts of it grate somewhat although the 'set pieces' are still very good. I suspect I'm much less able to identify with the main character as I get older.

I've read it two or three times with a similar sense of growing out of sympathy with him. The first time I read it I identified with him completely, and felt by the end that I'd been given a good talking to for my own good. I've read most of Fowles's output and I think this is the best thing he ever wrote, though I'm not sure how far it would appeal now to someone of the age I was when I first read it, and I'm not sure whether it would ever have particularly appealed to women, though maybe I'm wrong about that, I don't know any women who have read it. I haven't seen the film.

[pastoralguy]

I've read it two or three times with a similar sense of growing out of sympathy with him. The first time I read it I identified with him completely, and felt by the end that I'd been given a good talking to for my own good. I've read most of Fowles's output and I think this is the best thing he ever wrote, though I'm not sure how far it would appeal now to someone of the age I was when I first read it, and I'm not sure whether it would ever have particularly appealed to women, though maybe I'm wrong about that, I don't know any women who have read it. I haven't seen the film.

The film is pretty much a failure which is almost inevitably bearing in mind the complex and fantastical nature of the story. Urfe was played by Michael Caine who is quoted as saying it's the least favourite of his films. The photography is superb though.

[Conchis]

I've read it two or three times with a similar sense of growing out of sympathy with him. The first time I read it I identified with him completely, and felt by the end that I'd been given a good talking to for my own good. I've read most of Fowles's output and I think this is the best thing he ever wrote, though I'm not sure how far it would appeal now to someone of the age I was when I first read it, and I'm not sure whether it would ever have particularly appealed to women, though maybe I'm wrong about that, I don't know any women who have read it. I haven't seen the film.

I know a few women who have read and love it, even though you’d think they might have a problem with Nicholas.

Apparently, it’’s Judi Dench’s Desert Island book.

I would say Fowles’ first three novels (The Collector, The Magus ad TFLW) are all essential reading, though I think TFLW represents the summit of his achievement. After that, I find his work increasingly self-absorbed and less and less interesting. I can’t remember a single thing about Daniel Martin!

Btw: I love the endings of both The Magus and TFLW. People who don’t ‘get’ them are Sunday driver readers!

[Conchis]

The film is pretty much a failure which is almost inevitably bearing in mind the complex and fantastical nature of the story. Urfe was played by Michael Caine who is quoted as saying it's the least favourite of his films. The photography is superb though.

Fowles himseelf appears briefly in the film, as a Greek sailor saying the single word ‘Phraxos!’to Michael Caine near the beginning.

Fowles’ own account of the making of the film is very amusing, as is his entry on meeting Michael Caine (whom he considered ‘a thoroughly dislikeable young man’). He felt that Caine was bizarre casting (and he was - Terence Stamp, who was a Fowles’ old hand after having played Clegg in The Collector, would have been better) but obviously didn’t make enough of a fuss to reject him. Guy Green clearly hadn’t got a clue what the film was about, and neither did most of the cast. Woody Allen’s comment on it has become legendary.

[Mal]

I know a few women who have read and love it, even though you’d think they might have a problem with Nicholas...

Marghanita Laski, Times Literary Supplement, certainly had problems with him, silly bad boy

"The scepticism with which the author endows his hero soon fails to alleviate the sheer ridiculousness of the incidents played out for his benefit. (...) (C)oils tighten, idiocy deepens and exasperation exacerbates while no commonplace curiosa are left unturned (.....) Certainly Mr. Fowles can tell a story and can often write extremely well (.....) Yet in total The Magus is a silly book and an unhealthy one."

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popgb/fowlesj.htm

"If I had to live my life again, I'd do everything the same, except that I wouldn't see The Magus." - Woody Allen

What would you add to the sentence:

"If I had to live my life again, I'd do everything the same, except that I wouldn't read... "

For me, The Magus would fit, there are dozens more, and hundreds that I had the sense to stop after fifty pages or so. Anyway, just choose one, and the Magus has been panned enough so try something else, something you finished, though you wish you hadn't.

I really wish I hadn't read the "The Stand" by Stephen King - like Fowles he's a storyteller, but even sillier and less healthy; and it's longer than the Magus, why oh why did I carry on reading?

[Conchis]

Marghanita Laski, Times Literary Supplement, certainly had problems with him, silly bad boy

"The scepticism with which the author endows his hero soon fails to alleviate the sheer ridiculousness of the incidents played out for his benefit. (...) (C)oils tighten, idiocy deepens and exasperation exacerbates while no commonplace curiosa are left unturned (.....) Certainly Mr. Fowles can tell a story and can often write extremely well (.....) Yet in total The Magus is a silly book and an unhealthy one."

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popgb/fowlesj.htm

"If I had to live my life again, I'd do everything the same, except that I wouldn't see The Magus." - Woody Allen

What would you add to the sentence:

"If I had to live my life again, I'd do everything the same, except that I wouldn't read... "

For me, The Magus would fit, there are dozens more, and hundreds that I had the sense to stop after fifty pages or so. Anyway, just choose one, and the Magus has been panned enough so try something else, something you finished, though you wish you hadn't.

I really wish I hadn't read the "The Stand" by Stephen King - like Fowles he's a storyteller, but even sillier and less healthy; and it's longer than the Magus, why oh why did I carry on reading?

The two that spring immediately to mind are:

A Walk On The Wild Side - Nelson Algren

The Misogynist - Piers Paul Read

PPR is actually one of my favourite writers but he fell down badly with that book.

[Conchis]

On a lighter note, I've long cherished this (hopefully not apocryphal) exchange:

Marx (to Engels): You know, Friedrich, that mistress of yours.....I don't like her.

Engels Why? Because having a mistress is 'bourgeois'?

Marx: No, that doesn't bother me at all. But why did the one you chose have to be so dreadfully common?

[Petrushka]

East West Street by Philippe Sands.

This is an engrossing book, part family history, part legal history and intellectual thriller moving from Lvov to Vienna, Paris, London and the Nuremberg Trial.

The research is formidable but the book is highly readable. For those who've read it (and those who are about to) I think it is the entirely unknown story of Elsie Tilney that is both the most moving and memorable. It is a tale of wartime heroism that deserves to be much better known and celebrated. A remarkable woman.

Strongly recommended.

[Bryn]

Not quite yet but arriving tomorrow:

[CallMePaul]

White Highlands by John McGhie. This is a book set in Kenya in the 1950s and 2008 about Mau Mau and the British reaction to it. The book is a shocker if somewhat predictable in parts. I expect to finish it this evening or tomorrow. I have not seen the ending but there have been a number of clues as to how it may end, so few surprises as I read on.

[Joseph K]

I've just finished reading J. G. Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company. It's the most surreal book I've ever read - and that is exactly something I'm after. Superb book.