Bookworm central

[Nemia]

Books I just finished: Pamela Hicks' book about her life as Mountbatten (Daughter of Empire), i.e. until her marriage - beautifully written, with a wry humour and some fascinating insights. What an interesting woman! And I'm in awe of her mother - what a character!

Gary Fildes' book about his journey from bricklayer to astronomer (An Astronomer's Tale: A Life Under the Stars) - layered nicely with descriptions of constellations, the cosmos, the planets, nebulae and clusters and telescopes... both very interesting, I read this book in no time.

Gabriella Bernardi's Unforgotten Sisters, a book about female astronomers from Babylon to Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerset. A thorough proofreading would have done this book a world of good, but still, the facts are interesting and I enjoy it (I'm half through).

And I started right now Lon Milo DuQuette's Book of Ordinary Oracles - he has a funny writing style and I love his ideas. I feel empowered now to use my pendulum again and to start using more oracles. Let's see how I like it when I finish it! It's my third LMDQ book (read the Thoth and Kabbalah books before) and I appreciate a writer on an esoteric topic that doesn't sound as though he had eaten wisdom with a spade. And a great topic for an inquiring, creative mind like his.

Oh, and Dava Sobel's Planets was a joy to read, and also Joan Bunning's Tarot Reversals.

[SteveGus]

I am all about non-fiction. Fiction for me works better in bite sized portions; I much prefer short stories to book length novels. And if I do read fiction, it's almost all science fiction or fantasy, broadly defined. If I wanted to read about ordinary people here on earth, I'd read some history.

Currently reading A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Feng Youlan and just started The Witch by Ronald Hutton.

[fractalgranny]

I just can't get myself to read on a device. My husband reads EVERYTHING on his phone (and he reads a lot.) I've managed to read 1 1/2 books on a device so far, over the course of 8 years or so :) I need to hold a book on my hand. It's part of the magic. A big part.

I just finished The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron by AC Wise. Loved it. Very fun and inspirational! A bunch of imperfect female heroes (some born female, some not) who each find their special strengths through and away from adversity. And it has cocktail recipes!

"Dark Matter: Reading The Bones" is a book I loved - a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories written by people from the African diaspora.

[Charlie Brown]

Yes. I really don't like reading books on a screen. I do read a fair number of magazine articles that people link to on facebook, but I do greatly prefer the hard copy.

[Nemia]

I've been re-visiting the world of Hermann Hesse lately, a writer that meant a lot to me and influenced me in my youth. Especially his essays about literature shaped my taste, and I've been an avid reader of 19th century novels ever since (Turgenyev, Flaubert, Goethe, Moerike, Arnim etc). His Glass Bead Game is an interesting, though completely woman-less vision of pure spirit, an esthetic province that can easily become oppressive to the reader. The whole hippie enthusiasm for Hesse seems to me like a big misunderstanding (just like in the case of Tolkien), but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm right now reading a collection of essays analyzing and interpreting Hesse (also read a biography, by Schwilk, that showed Hesse in a thoroughly unpleasant light), and I'm a bit freaked out that none of the erudite scholars asks himself what a strange idea of women Hesse had...

Nevertheless, the Jungian influence, the interest in the Middle Ages, in literature and painting and music make Hesse an interesting author in spite of his shortcomings. He's somewhere between Romantic/Realism of the 19th century and 20th century modernism, without belonging to either, and definitely middle brow.

I meet while reading the young girl of 15 I used to be some decades ago and sigh about her. She thought she was such a rebellious, critical spirit and yet swallowed all kind of weird ideas...

[Charlie Brown]

The whole hippie enthusiasm for Hesse seems to me like a big misunderstanding (just like in the case of Tolkien), but maybe I'm wrong.

If you'd care to expand on that, I'm all ears.

[Serpentwand]

His Glass Bead Game is an interesting, though completely woman-less vision of pure spirit, an esthetic province that can easily become oppressive to the reader.

Thanks for that Nemia, I got a CD in the post yesterday by a 1970s Yugoslavian space rock band whose name is apparently a translation of "Glass Bead Game" as they were very impressed by the book, so was wondering what it was about .

[Nemia]

The whole hippie enthusiasm for Hesse seems to me like a big misunderstanding (just like in the case of Tolkien), but maybe I'm wrong.

If you'd care to expand on that, I'm all ears.

Well, that's just "from the sleeve", I didn't undertake any research about it. I remember the late 60s, was a child then but could perceive the cultural shift very well. (My mother, then a young student, was part of it, went to London, wore mini skirts and wrote her thesis about Leonard Cohne - my father, then a middle-aged civil servant, resented it, listened to Handel and believed that women have to serve men).

Hippies loved Hesse's Steppenwolf because they saw a strong psychedelic element in it. They saw themselves as steppenwolves, lost in the society as it is, howling against it, seeking ways out by rebellion, depression, use of drugs and music and spiritual experimentation. I don't know how many of them recognized that Hesse himself was interested neither in rebellion nor in changing the world nor in the jazz music and dance his hero indulged in. He sees all that as degrading, a phase his hero goes through to show that the sensual world is part of the human experience - but implicitly, Hesse has no patience for the world of the senses. He's steeped in strict Pietist ideals, and if you peel back all his Nietzschean and Burckhardtian and whatever layers, the pretty joyless Protestantism of his parents is still there. A deep-set suspicion of the values the hippies celebrated.

Hesse is at his best IMO where he describes adolescent crises because his own were so difficult and he bore the wounds. This part of his appeal is universal. Parents and school grind the young ones in the mill of black pedagogy - and where the movement I call hippies here (although it's much broader than that of course) rebels against this black pedagogy, Hesse would probably agree. Hesse himself was a problematic father and didn't really raise his own children, the question of HOW to raise children if not in the oppressive way he was raised doesn't concern him at all. So he would only partially support the abolishment of black pedagogy - he wouldn't tell you what to do instead. He's a poet after all.

And Tolkien - well, I read him in 1976 when the hippie enthusiasm for his work was pretty fresh, and got my first set of Tolkien books by one such hippie. Again, I'm not sure Tolkien's strict Catholic ethos was visible to the counterculture students who embraced him. It's true Tolkien set fantasy literature free; it jumped up from his book like Athena from the head of Zeus, all complete and ready for battle, and generations of writers have imitated him or let themselves be inspired by Tolkien. But his ideal of the seemingly weak, underdog hobbits battling valiantly against the forces of evil was less inspired by idealistic young people taking on the institutions that limit them (the way the late 1960s students wanted), and more by the Christian paradox that the weakest are the strongest.

Again, a point where Tolkien does meet this movement is in the scars he bears - not from a clash with harsh parents and school, like Hesse, but from the trauma of World War I. The anti-war movement could cite Tolkien as a witness to the horrors of war - and yet, Tolkien describes a justified war, and his world view is not pacifist.

So I think that by pinning Hesse and Tolkien on their banners, the revolutionary, left-wing, sexually liberated students of the hippie movement cherry-picked their heroes' texts to find what suited them, and left away their strong Christian roots, basically conservative outlook and let's not even mention the image of women. Neither Hesse nor Tolkien saw women as equal to men although Tolkien at least had some strong female figures, something completely lacking in Hesse's oeuvre.

But we know by now that it took some time until the revolutionaries discovered the feminist issue, and it was left more or less to women to raise it. In the German student revolution of 1968, the male students wrote the pamphlets, and their female colleagues typed them and made coffee along with it until they had enough.

That's what I think, again, I may have overlooked something, this is written just spontaneously without consulting any books ;-)

[Nemia]

His Glass Bead Game is an interesting, though completely woman-less vision of pure spirit, an esthetic province that can easily become oppressive to the reader.

Thanks for that Nemia, I got a CD in the post yesterday by a 1970s Yugoslavian space rock band whose name is apparently a translation of "Glass Bead Game" as they were very impressed by the book, so was wondering what it was about .

I think it's called Josef Knecht in English. It's a classic of the 20th century and with all its shortcomings, a worthwhile read. I always enjoy it. The glass bead game itself is central to the novel. It's a game where people play with motifs from literature, philosophy, art, music and science - tarot would fit in beautifully.

Let's say you play with me, and we start with the Empress, move over to the planet Venus, to Wagner's Frau Venus in music, from there to medieval folk tales about Frau Venus and painted illuminations of the fall of Eve and then to Pre-Raphaelite fallen women.... in an associative but stringent movement from motif to motif while the listeners/viewers have sparks of insight. That's at least how I always imagined it is played, Hesse never really explains it.

In the book, there is a whole "order", a whole separate little world devoted to culture, art and research and people become masters in playing the game. It's fascinating to imagine a world where people devote their lives to such a game, and Hesse lets us live there for a while with his hero who becomes a master of the game.

[Serpentwand]

Hmm, gaining flashes of insight by following the meanings linking one thing in the world to another? That sounds like a very worthwhile pursuit .