july

Books

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

Addendum: cannot stress how much “In a Grove” changed the way I view the world when I was young

Addendum: cannot stress how much “In a Grove” changed the way I view the world when I was young

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Grove

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

Didn't realize this is what Rashōmon was based on. One of the authors that I was oddly drawn to as a teen was Yukio Mishima. Really hit hard during my tortured teen angst stage of life.