Reason read: BAC, LT
This is the second of 7 novels by the author. I've read 5 of his novels counting this one. It is a story of a young man who has a deformed foot and he is picked on by other boys in the private school. He attends college and studies philosophy and would like to be a writer. His parents divorce and die and he becomes an orphan at 15. Things are good until he marries and then his life is ruined compared to his life before with his male friends. This is not the best novel by the author and therefore it is less known. Rating 2.4 ( )

I had wanted to read this novel when I heard that it was Forster's favourite among his books, amounting to a roman a cle, or veiled spiritual autobiography. It starts by capturing a time when some young men went to university and found it to be a gigantic gentleman's club of bonhomie, intellectual conversation and comfortable ease - a far cry from today's universities of distracted late teenagers, commuting in only when they have to to a physical campus, most of the time working in a job, and treating their degrees like instrumental periods leading to more money, while circling above are well paid executives with little interest in academic tradition and their eye on the international ranking boards in a quest for more fee paying kiddies.

Awful ( )

Forster is best known for such classics as 'A Passage to India' and 'Howards End'; his other work does not get the exposure it deserves, and so 'The Longest Journey' has fallen out of its natural readership. This is a terrible shame; Forster wrote this book before he turned thirty, and yet it contains such wisdom and tact that you would expect it rather to have been the product of an older mind. But then Forster was always ahead, of himself, of his times, and of the literary world in general. I felt like I was soaking myself in culture with this novel, and adored every sentence. Remarkable. ( )

This novel starts off in Cambridge, where the main character, Rickie, is an undergraduate. Philosophical discussions are held, and nature is appreciated. The main character is sensitive, with literary inclinations, and a partially crippled foot. After Cambridge, Rickie is followed through life and unto his death, with marriage, employment, and family goings-on filling the interval.
The emphases of the novel are nature, human nature, emotions, class, poetry, art, philosophy, and family. Though the dramatic plot and characterisation were pretty good, it is the literary style and the ideas in this book that I most enjoyed. Some novels feel like they take ages to read, but this one seemed to be gone before I knew it, and felt far shorter than its 300 odd pages. This is usually a good sign. ( )