[creature_x]

Steppenwolf By Herman Hesse. It's remarkable how a fictional character written by someone a century ago can resonate so deeply with a modern person. But then again, that's a common thread amongst great literature. I recommend this book to anyone struggling with loneliness or feeling like they haven't found their footing in this world.

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at everything else.”

[eatrocs]

As much as I love Hesse - Plato's Republic allows me to channel the ghost of Socrates whenever I'm in need of company.

Back on topic - I would recommend all of Hesse's books. Glassbead is my personal favorite, but I wouldn't start with that.

[mikhailfranco]

Great recommendation. I think the magic for me is that you begin to read a strange narrative of characters in 1920s Germany. It is a tall tale of alienation.

SPOLIER ALERT - Then, slowly, and in the end, convincingly, you come to know he is writing about you the reader. That is a miracle of writing and time and space.

P.S. I think Catcher in the Rye also does that, if you are late teen, but is a far inferior work, and does not bear reading if you are past 20.

[flenserboy]

Give his Glass Bead Game a try; it is dense, delightful, & its content would appeal much to the denizens of this site.

[mikhailfranco]

I assume Hesse was familiar with Kafka and Freud.

GBG has that dream-like Kafkaesque frustration of having a concrete objective, but not be able to achieve it, even though it should be simple and tangible.

However, in GBG it is all meta: the game is unspecified, the objective is unspecified, the adorable miraculous winning play is unspecified. It is meta-Kafka, which is incredibly doubly frustrating...

SPOLIER ALERT: then, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, a realization creeps over you - GBG is life.

Really a tremendous literary achievement.

[WillAdams]

Not sure how I feel about the on-going vanishing of efforts to create The Glass Bead Game as a computer interface/programming methodology.

I want it to be something workable which helps folks in their use of computers, but the more I work with node programming interfaces and so forth, the more I worry that the fact that there is no universally agreed-upon answer to the question:

>What does an algorithm look like?

and that such systems are strongly-bounded complexity-wise by screen size, that they simply aren't workable beyond small/toy problems and educational usage, i.e., Blockly.

[Triphibian]

Narcissus and Goldmund is great. It feels like he's re-approaching themes from Siddhartha, but that notion of paths taken is worth exploring again and again.

[creature_x]

Agreed! There is definitely overlap between the three books but my recollection of Siddhartha and N&G is that Hesse dwelled more into how hedonic pleasure corrodes the soul. On a side note, you'll get along well with Doestevesky's Brothers Karamazov if you found N&G affecting.

[creature_x]

I actually started with The Glass Bead Game, but I found it too dense. Perhaps I'll give it another try!

[biztos]

I like Hesse and I like Steppenwolf even though neither is my favorite -- but there is a fragment in Steppenwolf that I will never forget, that I have used often, and that anchors the love side of my love-hate relationship with the German language:

"...um im Gasthaus [...] das zu trinken, was trinkende Männer nach einer alten Konvention »ein Gläschen Wein« nennen."

English: in order to drink in the pub that which drinking men, according to an old convention, call "a little glass of wine."

But trust me, it really works in German.

[pks016]

My favorite is Siddhartha.

[low_tech_love]

+1 for this one, it’s such a delightful experience to read.