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Russell wrote: "The French Lieutenant’s Woman, on the other hand, continues to give pleasure."

Definitely the best book by Fowles out of the ones I read.

AB76 wrote: "my kult books were :L'Etranger and Notes from Underground, both of which i still love and are as important today as when i was 18-24."

Both absolutely brilliant and still worth reading... I didn't think of 'Notes from Underground' as being a cult book, though - since it was first published in 1864, around 100 years before I read it!

Tam wrote: "I never did get 'Existentialism' somehow, though my only foray was 'Being and Nothingness' which I did not take to at all. "

Haha! Totally unreadable - I didn't get very far with that one. Much more digestible and comprehensible is Existentialism and Humanism by Sartre, which I liked a lot - plus it's short! It's a long time ago - FWIW, the one thing I remember taking from existentialism was the idea that we can to a degree alter our characters by a force of will, which I think is true up to a point - but a complete removal of the genetic factors is unrealistic. I suppose it's more accurate to say that we can change our behaviours.

AB76 wrote: "i love the french existentialists, along with the less memorable new novelists like Robbe-Grillet.(though i prefer the films of Robbe-Grillet)

For me Camus, Sartre and other existentialists followed the earlier fiction of writers like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun and Kierkegaard...
i always felt these novels asked important questions, though maybe without answers. I prefer no wrong or right answers personally, so the debate goes on and on."

I like your comments here.

As for Robbe-Grillet, he is one of the victims of my favourite recent literary joke (which I have almost certainly posted before, but never mind...)

In Laurent Binet's , the protagonist is being pursued through a library by a psychopathic killer, turns into the 'Nouvelle Roman' aisle - only (to his horror) to find out that it is a dead end!

MK wrote: "It's Mother's Day here, so when I saw this post on the dreaded facebook (FB) from Jacqueline Winspear."

An interesting and moving post - thanks - I didn't know all that about Mothering Sunday, which we never observed (I doubt that I even heard of it as a kid).

Georg wrote: "My "cult books" when I was 16 or 17 were Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha" and "The Steppenwolf".

When I was 19 it was Simone de Beauvoir's "The Mandarins of Paris"

I have no wish to revisit them..."

Hesse was very popular in the 1960s, and I read pretty much all of them - including 'The Glass Bead Game', though it was harder going than 'Siddhartha', 'Narziss and Goldmund' and 'Demian' which were the ones I liked best (and were shorter). Like you, I don't feel moved to re-read them, but they had their uses.

As for 'Steppenwolf' (not my favourite of the novels) - you probably know of the existence of a US band who took that name, and whose song 'Born to be wild' features in the cult movie 'Easy Rider'... not a lifestyle I ever embraced, but there is something exhilarating about the thought of just heading out 'somewhere' in the vastness of the USA which is so much larger than our tiny island Great Britain.

WRT de Beauvoir - I read The Second Sex (yes, all the way through) - it was OK but it felt as if too much hype had surrounded it - and her novel The Blood of Others which wasn't very good IMO.

The book of hers I liked best by a country mile was her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which is excellent.

Georg wrote: "I just remembered: when I was about 18 THE cult book in my school class was "Lord of the Rings".

Pretty much everyone at uni was reading this - but I always knew that fantasy wasn't for me, never read it, never wanted to either.
I read Harry Potter - to my daughter to help her get to sleep when she was little. It bored me so much that on a couple of occasions it was me who went to sleep instead!

scarletnoir wrote: "MK wrote: "It's Mother's Day here, so when I saw this post on the dreaded facebook (FB) from Jacqueline Winspear."

An interesting and moving post - thanks - I didn't know all that about Mothering ..."

You are not alone Scarlet, it certainly wasn’t around when I was a child, nor Fathers’s Day. I asked my husband and he said the same. Don’t think it rally came in over here ubtil well after WW2.

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "i love the french existentialists, along with the less memorable new novelists like Robbe-Grillet.(though i prefer the films of Robbe-Grillet)

For me Camus, Sartre and other existenti..."

fantastic, loved that scarlet