Should you read Lucky Jim?

I have to say that Kinsley Amis shows a bit of surprising tenderness and psychological insight as we near the end of "Lucky Jim," in two long chapters during which the eponymous Jim Dixon determines that the beautiful Christine is really out of his league and that he should make the best of his on-again off-again relationship with the less appealing, needy Margaret. Amis, for all his high-jinx comic descriptions and his penchant for pratfalls - the ripped trousers, for example - writes strong dialogue that really unfolds the characters' thoughts and feelings - but he doesn't get lost in vast patches of dialogue either, the long discourse between Jim and Christine over hotel tea punctuated by visits from the haughty waiter, increasingly getting on Jim's nerves. I'm at the point in the book now, near the end, at which Dixon is about to deliver his long-anticipated lecture on Merrie England, n preparation for which he becomes far too loaded with whiskey and sherry, so we suspect the worst, but then again he's "lucky." I'm withholding final judgment till I've actually finished the book, but was asked yesterday should I read it, and I think the answer has to be that it's a book that was of its time and has over the years lost much of its edge and all of its charm - the sexism and the cynicism seem very much of another era. Jim may be lucky, but he's also a self-pitying loser, and perhaps in that time there were fewer opportunities and England was much more class-bound than today, but I think any reader today would just want to tell him: get on with it, find another job, move, go someplace else, don't devote your life to a profession that you obviously detest.