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

building /bracket | talking /greatbooks | ex-BCG, ex-PHD | poli + phil + econ

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

I would join a July book club in a heartbeat 

Also a @tldr book club 


But really this being one of the “top ten Asian novels of all time” makes me want to read the top books from every major culture

Midwest mom in a California dad bod || Ruthlessly pro Farcaster