Open Thread: What are you reading?

I’m not reading anything fictional since I have an oddly hard time getting into novels these days. Not like when I was an kid at all, I read SO much stuff. However I have begun taking German lessons at the local Adult Education centre (yay!) so I will soon be buying resource materials to help me progress. Wünderbar!

On an unrelated note, I have a question to ask the community: should I play Overwatch? I’m really tempted however I have never played a modern FPS before, let alone an MMO one. I also only have a laptop so if I can’t manage the specs, I’ll just have to pass.

I am just beginning to read “Shrill” by Lindy West. Any fans of hers here?

@Moggie
Honestly, anytime I see ‘metal umlauts’ I die a little inside. That’s not how you spell that word, jackass! Except Motörhead. At least that’s phonetically correct. Mötley Crüe can go fuck itself tho…

Kinda OT but the streamer I mentioned yesterday would piss off so many MGTOW/MRA types and I love that. They give advice to the party (“B side, watch out for the dash. Back to unmarked…”) plays a huge variety of games, has their own life and friends, drinks and smokes and makes filthy jokes, and is generally fun to follow, even when feeling down. And the keyword is “fun”, given how many GGers and their ilk seem to be virulently opposed to fun and instead focus all their energy on making other people miserable as they are.

@Axe

Remember when Jay-Z used to have an umlaut over the y?

The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I love the way he framed things, he was going into some of the details of things like subtle bias and non-hateful prejudice before the academic vocabulary was completely established (at least, that’s what it seems like, I might be wrong). It’s actually interesting how critical he was of himself, of all people.

I read master and margarira. But my favourite book is Idiot by Dototevsky.

@Valentine
I had to give up on Idiot about halfway through because it was really dense and difficult for me to read (I read super slow and if there’s too much going on even slower). I’m still sad about that because I hear such good things.

@EJ (The Other One) – from 2 pages ago – what do I think The Glass Bead Game is about? It’s about too many things! I will be long-winded and not give you a clear answer!

I didn’t read it as an allegory, though there are historical jokes and references. The book openly compares Castalia with monastic communities and classical universities (which might explain why the Castalia hierarchy is all men… still not the best excuse, IMO). I guessed that Plinio Designori was named after Pliny the Elder. (Why, though?) In any case it seems very distant from things that were happening at the time, such as WW2, though Knecht worries that Castalia could be easily destroyed by a coming war.

I guess I’d put it in the category of philosophical SF, neither utopia nor dystopia. One of the main problems with the Castalian hierarchy and the Glass Bead Game, in my view, is that they’re all based on past art/creativity, but making new art is frowned on. That would seem to lead to the system’s decline, war or no war. I also think Hesse is making fun of scholarship in general, though he seems fascinated by its possibilities.

(Side note: I’ve read a bit about Hesse’s book Siddhartha, enough to know he was interested in Buddhism, though not uncritically – so for him impermanence might not be such a sad/preventable thing.)

At the same time, Knecht’s individualism is also made fun of a bit…

– SPOILER ALERT –

…since the moment he Goes His Own Way, as it were, he dies – drowns after diving into cold water, trying to catch up with his student. His self-determination can’t overcome physical weakness; he doesn’t get to live out his dream of being a simple teacher; but he does leave behind his student and the “biography”.

I have a pet theory that Tito Designori is the narrator. YMMV, as TV Tropes would say.

…

Gah, that was long winded and I didn’t give you a clear answer. Ask an Eng Lit graduate a simple question…

Well, I BOUGHT Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and I will start reading it soon. I still pick up an obscure sci-fi I bought that I still haven’t gotten through because it’s emotionally hard to read.

@epitome of incomprehensibility:
That’s very interesting, thank you. I’m always fascinated in seeing different people’s takes on novels, especially if they know more about it than I do. Literature is one of these things that, if I lived my life again like some sort of Harry August, I could easily spend a lifetime on.

When I read Glass Bead Game, I understood it as being a satire on European civilisation – that Hesse thought it had gotten so obsessed with hierarchy and with its past glories that there was increasingly little life within it. I have no idea how orthodox this view is.

I’m interested by your placing the novel within the science fiction genre – is that commonly accepted? Do we know if contemporary or later science fiction writers read or were influenced by it?

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HERE BE SPOILERS – YE BE WARNED

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I’m fascinated by your comment about Going His Own Way and then dying because he’s too weak – I hadn’t thought of it that way but it really makes sense. To me it was a profoundly Christian moment: one must leave this frail, sinful flesh behind in order to progress to a better world.

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris is enthralling me at the moment. As someone whose main exposure to the story had previously only been the Disney movie, and knowing how that version greatly lightened the tone, I went in expecting a serious and weighty read, but I’m finding myself surprised by the wit and humanity in Hugo’s writing.

The lengthy discourses on Parisian architectural history are a little wearying – I tend to get bored very quickly if an author decides to filibuster and find myself flipping ahead to get things moving again – but I enjoyed them here, mostly for Hugo’s excellent descriptiveness.