Books

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

What was the novel you read as a tween or teen that twisted you up inside and made you feel years older?

If I had to choose one
- Narcissus and Goldmund (Hesse)

As a teen I also remember:
- Demian (Hesse) classic coming of age story
- Siddhartha (Hesse)
- On the Penal Colony (Kafka)
- Rashomon (Akutagawa)
- In a Grove (Akutagawa)
- The Grand Inquisitor (Dostoevsky)
- Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky)
- Nausea (Sartre)

As a tween:
- Every single Harry Potter book
- LOTR
- Also not a novel but I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion (the whole series and the movie and I remember being really drawn to how wild it was compared to anything else I’d ever seen)

In Hesse’s Demian, Demian talks about living a comfortable life in a “World of Light” as a child, and he sees the outside world of darkness. Similarly, Siddhartha starts out comfortably but must venture into the outside world full of darkness. Maybe this coming of age idea is what Hesse has a lot in his novels, but it resonated with me a lot at the time. I remember feeling it deeply. And the other novels I read that I listed here are still great too

Coming of age themes resonate deeply in Hesse's works and other classics like Dostoevsky and Sartre. Harry Potter and LOTR captivated me as a tween, while Neon Genesis Evangelion stood out for its wildness