Zooze the Horse roams around the pasture near Lamar State College. Zooze thinks about problems in academia. Zhe wants proffies to submit posts (blog posts, not fence posts).
Monday, May 11, 2020
big hungry about books
Which book was important to you when you were 20 or 25 years old, and still is important to you? Or is there not one?
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It has a special place in my heart because it was the first "grown-up" book I read entirely on my own. (On the recommendation of a teacher. No 12-year-old should be reading Brave New World, but you can take that up with my seventh-grade social-studies teacher.) I read it again every few years, and it's a completely different book every single time. In fact, that's the whole reason I keep reading it—to see what it will say to me this time.
I'm not normally a fan of political fiction—my go-to genre for entertainment is mysteries—but this particular work took root early and has blossomed in odd ways ever since.
The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy shook me up then, but is not particularly important to me now.
Books from then that are still important (and like PP I still read)? 2, that I can think of.
The Wayfarers' Journal, by John Lloyd. A group of walkers, who both enjoy the British countryside, and skills such as calligraphy, cartography, and bookbinding, created a compilation of their hikes from the 60s to about 1990. Any Anglophile readers would love it.
Our Song, by Keith Waterhouse. The opening page put me off affairs forever (not that I was married at that point, nor particularly likely to indulge anyway) more effectively than, say, Fatal Attraction, ever could have.
It's good to be back - 3 weeks in the hospital, not Covid, fortunately. Hope everyone is doing well.
My experience with Michael Crichton's Travels has been similar to PP's. I first read it when it came out 32-33 years ago. Over the decades, as I have read it again and again, I see it differently. I wonder to what extent this ostensibly non-fiction book is Crichton's way of playfully and respectfully gaslighting the reader, seeing what he can get away with, challenging the reader, and so on. Or did Crichton approach it all with complete candor at the time? Or something else? The book continues to be a puzzle to me, and it makes me look at myself and wonder about my own ignorance and gullibility.
Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is something like this, too. To what extent did he embellish, etc.... Regardless, it's always been a pleasure for me to read.
The Little Prince, which I first read in its original French when I was a small child, is in the same category in the sense that it has affected me differently over the decades. It has revealed to me something about my maturation over the years.
Another book of which I have remained quite fond for different reasons is The Paper Chase. I can't really say my perceptions of the book have changed over the years since I first read it when I was a child. But I have always enjoyed it. The first time I read it, I was far away from Boston, but I stayed up all night reading it and feeling like I was in Boston/Cambridge. That book will probably always be a time machine for me--taking me back to Boston circa 1970.
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse, was one of the most popular novels among young Americans in the 1960s. It was published in 1927. In 1961, Hesse wrote that he considered Steppenwolf to be his most "violently" misunderstood work. This was because he wrote Steppenwolf when approaching 50, and he intended it to be about the difficulties of that age, but it had fallen into the hands of "very young readers."
When I was approaching 50, I decided to have another look at Steppenwolf. Did I really miss so much when I was young? I did indeed.
The last time I read anything by Hesse was in 1977, when I was 17. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I was taking a freshman seminar course about Hesse, in which we read most of his novels.
Hesse's novels are mostly semi-autobiographical. They mainly concern the tension between the intellect and the senses, or in other words the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the search for meaning in his characters' lives.
Hesse's characters don't search for the meaning of life in general: they search for meaning in their own lives. Some end badly. In Beneath the Wheel, the protagonist is a failed student ill suited for life outside the academy, and he drowns after a bender. (This was based on Hesse's own experience of being expelled from a seminary, and his subsequent attempted suicide.) Some end better, at least for the protagonist. Siddhartha does find serenity, but it's never said whether his abandoned wife and child do. Narcissus and Goldmund is similar: Goldmund decides that a career as an artist will be too mundane for him, but only after he's expended huge amounts of his mentor's time and energy. Goldmund tries to end their association with a handshake: when his mentor gets angry, Hesse wants the reader to sympathize with Goldmund.
But then, Goldmund's mentor is just a narrow-minded, bourgeois stereotype of the kind Hesse enjoys kicking. And what about the trail of lovers Goldmund leaves behind him? How many had children by him, and who will take care of them? Certainly not Goldmund. Since the 1960s, "doing your own thing" like this has become a problem for American society. Far too many people don't seem to realize that other people need to live on this planet too. Hesse's ideas may have seemed intriguing in the repressive and repressed Germany of Hesse's time (and in the America of the 1950s), but now it's become obvious that Hesse's ideas have problems of their own.
Steppenwolf is semi-autobiographical, but it's also clearly suffused with fantasy. Harry Haller has the same initials as Hermann Hesse. Hermine is the female form of Hermann. Some readers wonder how Haller makes a living: he's a writer who is between books, living modestly off the royalties from his previous ones, like Hesse did for much of his life. The ennui engendered by this is one reason for all the existential angst, both for Haller and for Hesse. Haller was lambasted by the jingoistic, reactionary press in Germany for his anti-war work. So was Hesse, who'd emigrated from Germany to Switzerland by the time he wrote Steppenwolf.
One reason that Steppenwolf was so popular in the 1960s, and with young people, is Hesse's view of his superiority over anyone not just like him. Ayn Rand's novels are also full of this, and they appeal to adolescents, too. Another novel popular in the '60s with similar themes was Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Unlike Rand, Steppenwolf appealed primarily to young hippies, because it's suffused with sex and drugs. This might have been avant-garde when Steppenwolf was written, but nowadays it seems naïve, almost childish. Don't they know that cocaine really isn't good for you at all?
Written between the wars, Steppenwolf has a strong current of apprehension and dread. To me, this was one of the best themes of the novel. It extends to technology, an important theme for our time, but I found the treatment superficial, because Hesse clearly didn't understand technology, or science. Again, I found this quaint and naïve. Seeing how no one wants to give up their cell phones, we're going to have to learn to live with technology, and manage it wisely. Hesse repudiates this at the very end, though, since he notes how he needs to learn to enjoy even "radio music." (High fidelity sound reproduction wouldn't appear until decades after Steppenwolf.) But then, that's the point of the novel: Harry Haller repudiates his old, gloomy thinking at the end, much to his benefit.
Is Steppenwolf great literature? I'm not sure. It seems dated. Considering how American society has coarsened since the 1960s, the first half of Steppenwolf tried my patience. We may stop kicking the bourgeoisie, also known as the middle class: they've been under siege for a long time now. Yes, they can be a thoughtless bunch of yahoos, as the professor and his wife are with Harry Haller, but these sins are not unique to the middle class. As Haller does note, they do have a comfortable, orderly, and often charming lifestyle. They're supposed to have good manners, too. I miss good manners, and am saddened by how they've been abandoned since the 1960s.
I am unusual and lucky, in that I never had problems with the meaning and purpose of my life. Hesse's angst about the meaninglessness of existence in the first half of Steppenwolf therefore fell flat on me, but I can see how it could mean more to other readers. Again, though, it is repudiated at the end of Steppenwolf.
But then, to be great literature, doesn't it have to be universal? Steppenwolf was much criticized because of how it ended, but even when I was 17, I understood that it was only supposed to be a fantasy. The overall message is: lighten up, don't take yourself so seriously, don't fear death since no one escapes it, and above all, learn to laugh. This is a worthwhile message, but I think that Ray Bradbury said this better in Something Wicked This Way Comes. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, this message didn't go completely over my head when I was 17, the way it did when I first read Steppenwolf. But then, when I was 17, I was much too distracted by the sex and drugs.
"The Physical Universe," by Frank Shu, was published in 1982. It’s still the best-ever introduction to astrophysics for students who have completed three semesters of introductory, calculus-based physics---in other words, students who want to become professional astronomers and have a plausible chance of doing it. I still give my students homework problems from it. How these problems closely resemble real problems that real scientists grapple with, as opposed to the contrived, canned problems that most textbooks have, can quickly reveal the promising students from the so-so ones, even if none of them seem very good at first. Unfortunately, Frank never published a second edition. I still used it for many years with revisions to each chapter that I wrote and handed out to students, but I stopped this some time ago. It simply won’t do to have a textbook on astrophysics, no matter how good, that refers to Hubble Space Telescope entirely in the future tense. I dream of writing a new textbook based on The Physical Universe myself. It will take some doing.
"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" are still the best-ever introduction to calculus-based physics. I would never use them as a textbook for any of the three semesters of this course, because over 90% of students would wail that it’s like drinking out of a firehose. But they are perfect for studying for the GRE physics exam, and for qualifying exams in grad school.
"Calculus" by Michal Spivak is still great. It was the book that showed me that drinking out of a firehose isn’t so bad, if the water sparkles.
Every book in the Time-Life Science Library from the 1960s was great. It bums me out how the ones that came out in the 1980s were so dumbed down.
Much of what Carl Sagan wrote has dated quite well, particularly "Pale Blue Dot" and "The Demon Haunted World." So has his "Cosmos" TV series.
I still enjoy "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, even though he got quite a bit wrong. The writing style is lively and easy to follow: it doesn't read like a philosophy book. (As Mencken observed, "Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on Earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.") One reason for Bertrand's writing style being lively is that he doesn't hesitate to inject his opinion. Some philosophers and historians complain about this "editorializing," but I like it. It's fun to watch him rip into Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas, because he was smarter than they were!
"The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells are still darn good reads. So is "The Martian Chronicles," by Ray Bradbury, even though we know the real Mars isn't like that. So is just about every story in "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." So is "Indian Tales," by Jaime De Angulo. "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig still blows my mind. "All the King's Men" and "1984" are good reads but are disturbing, these days. "The Exciting World of Dinosaurs" and "Just So Stories" have dated a bit much, but I read them long before I was 20-25.
What book should everybody read before the age of 21?
“The Catcher in the Rye” and the whole nutsy-adorable Glass family saga. For my ’50s generation, Salinger was an addiction, and dominated much of our conversations, and even our ambitions. The lives we led, or pretended to lead, seemed to exist under the distracted eye of the disappeared genius. One had to get older to get past him. On the other hand, if you read “Gatsby” before 21, it was a good book, but reading it again 20 years later, you find a great Gatsby.
But remember, I was born in 1929, so little I read as a young man would make sense to a young reader today. I devoured John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and, every bit as appropriate today as in my youth, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
What book should nobody read until the age of 40?
Just about anything you read that shaped your life before you were 40. It’s shocking to find out how much the books have changed as you’ve changed.
I didn't like "The Catcher in the Rye" as a teenager, and I still don't like it. Holden Caulfield makes no sense to me at all. I'm glad I never had to read it for an English class, because whatever paper I would have written on it would not have been kind.
"An American Tragedy," on the other hand, dated as it is, seems much more relevant to me. The main theme—that an under-educated and haphazardly brought-up young person is in a vulnerable and therefore dangerous position in life—is something we as a society still don't seem to have completely grasped.
I'm a white, female, straight, suburban-raised, college-educated boomer, if that explains anything.
I was never a fan of "The Catcher in the Rye" either. But then, I'm one of those rare weirdos who never had a problem with meaning and purpose in his life: ever since I was 5, I have wanted to explore the Universe, and in my own way I've had some modest success. I suspect this may be why I've never had even a twinge of Impostor Syndrome, so common among academics: when I do something badly, I know it's because I did it badly, not because I'm not an astronomer, because I clearly am one of those, albeit one who doesn't always do things well---but then, who does?
Nevertheless, I can see why "The Catcher in the Rye" was and remains so popular. The great majority of Americans have no idea what they want to do when they grow up, and often still don't when they're over 50. I will also confess that I had the wonderful luck of being permitted to skip most of middle school in America: I did have one year of it, and didn't like it a bit.
Which book was important to you when you were 20 or 25 years old, and still is important to you?
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It has a special place in my heart because it was the first "grown-up" book I read entirely on my own. (On the recommendation of a teacher. No 12-year-old should be reading Brave New World, but you can take that up with my seventh-grade social-studies teacher.) I read it again every few years, and it's a completely different book every single time. In fact, that's the whole reason I keep reading it—to see what it will say to me this time.
ReplyDeleteI'm not normally a fan of political fiction—my go-to genre for entertainment is mysteries—but this particular work took root early and has blossomed in odd ways ever since.
The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy shook me up then, but is not particularly important to me now.
ReplyDeleteBooks from then that are still important (and like PP I still read)? 2, that I can think of.
The Wayfarers' Journal, by John Lloyd. A group of walkers, who both enjoy the British countryside, and skills such as calligraphy, cartography, and bookbinding, created a compilation of their hikes from the 60s to about 1990.
Any Anglophile readers would love it.
Our Song, by Keith Waterhouse. The opening page put me off affairs forever (not that I was married at that point, nor particularly likely to indulge anyway) more effectively than, say, Fatal Attraction, ever could have.
It's good to be back - 3 weeks in the hospital, not Covid, fortunately. Hope everyone is doing well.
My experience with Michael Crichton's Travels has been similar to PP's. I first read it when it came out 32-33 years ago. Over the decades, as I have read it again and again, I see it differently. I wonder to what extent this ostensibly non-fiction book is Crichton's way of playfully and respectfully gaslighting the reader, seeing what he can get away with, challenging the reader, and so on. Or did Crichton approach it all with complete candor at the time? Or something else? The book continues to be a puzzle to me, and it makes me look at myself and wonder about my own ignorance and gullibility.
ReplyDeleteHemingway's A Moveable Feast is something like this, too. To what extent did he embellish, etc.... Regardless, it's always been a pleasure for me to read.
The Little Prince, which I first read in its original French when I was a small child, is in the same category in the sense that it has affected me differently over the decades. It has revealed to me something about my maturation over the years.
Another book of which I have remained quite fond for different reasons is The Paper Chase. I can't really say my perceptions of the book have changed over the years since I first read it when I was a child. But I have always enjoyed it. The first time I read it, I was far away from Boston, but I stayed up all night reading it and feeling like I was in Boston/Cambridge. That book will probably always be a time machine for me--taking me back to Boston circa 1970.
EC1, best wishes for your recuperation.
Thanks, EC1 and Southern Bubba—I've added a few titles to my ever-lengthening "Read This" list based on your comments.
ReplyDeleteSteppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse, was one of the most popular novels among young Americans in the 1960s. It was published in 1927. In 1961, Hesse wrote that he considered Steppenwolf to be his most "violently" misunderstood work. This was because he wrote Steppenwolf when approaching 50, and he intended it to be about the difficulties of that age, but it had fallen into the hands of "very young readers."
ReplyDeleteWhen I was approaching 50, I decided to have another look at Steppenwolf. Did I really miss so much when I was young? I did indeed.
The last time I read anything by Hesse was in 1977, when I was 17. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I was taking a freshman seminar course about Hesse, in which we read most of his novels.
Hesse's novels are mostly semi-autobiographical. They mainly concern the tension between the intellect and the senses, or in other words the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the search for meaning in his characters' lives.
Hesse's characters don't search for the meaning of life in general: they search for meaning in their own lives. Some end badly. In Beneath the Wheel, the protagonist is a failed student ill suited for life outside the academy, and he drowns after a bender. (This was based on Hesse's own experience of being expelled from a seminary, and his subsequent attempted suicide.) Some end better, at least for the protagonist. Siddhartha does find serenity, but it's never said whether his abandoned wife and child do. Narcissus and Goldmund is similar: Goldmund decides that a career as an artist will be too mundane for him, but only after he's expended huge amounts of his mentor's time and energy. Goldmund tries to end their association with a handshake: when his mentor gets angry, Hesse wants the reader to sympathize with Goldmund.
But then, Goldmund's mentor is just a narrow-minded, bourgeois stereotype of the kind Hesse enjoys kicking. And what about the trail of lovers Goldmund leaves behind him? How many had children by him, and who will take care of them? Certainly not Goldmund. Since the 1960s, "doing your own thing" like this has become a problem for American society. Far too many people don't seem to realize that other people need to live on this planet too. Hesse's ideas may have seemed intriguing in the repressive and repressed Germany of Hesse's time (and in the America of the 1950s), but now it's become obvious that Hesse's ideas have problems of their own.
ReplyDeleteSteppenwolf is semi-autobiographical, but it's also clearly suffused with fantasy. Harry Haller has the same initials as Hermann Hesse. Hermine is the female form of Hermann. Some readers wonder how Haller makes a living: he's a writer who is between books, living modestly off the royalties from his previous ones, like Hesse did for much of his life. The ennui engendered by this is one reason for all the existential angst, both for Haller and for Hesse. Haller was lambasted by the jingoistic, reactionary press in Germany for his anti-war work. So was Hesse, who'd emigrated from Germany to Switzerland by the time he wrote Steppenwolf.
One reason that Steppenwolf was so popular in the 1960s, and with young people, is Hesse's view of his superiority over anyone not just like him. Ayn Rand's novels are also full of this, and they appeal to adolescents, too. Another novel popular in the '60s with similar themes was Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Unlike Rand, Steppenwolf appealed primarily to young hippies, because it's suffused with sex and drugs. This might have been avant-garde when Steppenwolf was written, but nowadays it seems naïve, almost childish. Don't they know that cocaine really isn't good for you at all?
Written between the wars, Steppenwolf has a strong current of apprehension and dread. To me, this was one of the best themes of the novel. It extends to technology, an important theme for our time, but I found the treatment superficial, because Hesse clearly didn't understand technology, or science. Again, I found this quaint and naïve. Seeing how no one wants to give up their cell phones, we're going to have to learn to live with technology, and manage it wisely. Hesse repudiates this at the very end, though, since he notes how he needs to learn to enjoy even "radio music." (High fidelity sound reproduction wouldn't appear until decades after Steppenwolf.) But then, that's the point of the novel: Harry Haller repudiates his old, gloomy thinking at the end, much to his benefit.
Is Steppenwolf great literature? I'm not sure. It seems dated. Considering how American society has coarsened since the 1960s, the first half of Steppenwolf tried my patience. We may stop kicking the bourgeoisie, also known as the middle class: they've been under siege for a long time now. Yes, they can be a thoughtless bunch of yahoos, as the professor and his wife are with Harry Haller, but these sins are not unique to the middle class. As Haller does note, they do have a comfortable, orderly, and often charming lifestyle. They're supposed to have good manners, too. I miss good manners, and am saddened by how they've been abandoned since the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteI am unusual and lucky, in that I never had problems with the meaning and purpose of my life. Hesse's angst about the meaninglessness of existence in the first half of Steppenwolf therefore fell flat on me, but I can see how it could mean more to other readers. Again, though, it is repudiated at the end of Steppenwolf.
But then, to be great literature, doesn't it have to be universal? Steppenwolf was much criticized because of how it ended, but even when I was 17, I understood that it was only supposed to be a fantasy. The overall message is: lighten up, don't take yourself so seriously, don't fear death since no one escapes it, and above all, learn to laugh. This is a worthwhile message, but I think that Ray Bradbury said this better in Something Wicked This Way Comes. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, this message didn't go completely over my head when I was 17, the way it did when I first read Steppenwolf. But then, when I was 17, I was much too distracted by the sex and drugs.
"The Physical Universe," by Frank Shu, was published in 1982. It’s still the best-ever introduction to astrophysics for students who have completed three semesters of introductory, calculus-based physics---in other words, students who want to become professional astronomers and have a plausible chance of doing it. I still give my students homework problems from it. How these problems closely resemble real problems that real scientists grapple with, as opposed to the contrived, canned problems that most textbooks have, can quickly reveal the promising students from the so-so ones, even if none of them seem very good at first. Unfortunately, Frank never published a second edition. I still used it for many years with revisions to each chapter that I wrote and handed out to students, but I stopped this some time ago. It simply won’t do to have a textbook on astrophysics, no matter how good, that refers to Hubble Space Telescope entirely in the future tense. I dream of writing a new textbook based on The Physical Universe myself. It will take some doing.
ReplyDelete"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" are still the best-ever introduction to calculus-based physics. I would never use them as a textbook for any of the three semesters of this course, because over 90% of students would wail that it’s like drinking out of a firehose. But they are perfect for studying for the GRE physics exam, and for qualifying exams in grad school.
"Calculus" by Michal Spivak is still great. It was the book that showed me that drinking out of a firehose isn’t so bad, if the water sparkles.
Every book in the Time-Life Science Library from the 1960s was great. It bums me out how the ones that came out in the 1980s were so dumbed down.
Much of what Carl Sagan wrote has dated quite well, particularly "Pale Blue Dot" and "The Demon Haunted World." So has his "Cosmos" TV series.
I still enjoy "A History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, even though he got quite a bit wrong. The writing style is lively and easy to follow: it doesn't read like a philosophy book. (As Mencken observed, "Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on Earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.") One reason for Bertrand's writing style being lively is that he doesn't hesitate to inject his opinion. Some philosophers and historians complain about this "editorializing," but I like it. It's fun to watch him rip into Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas, because he was smarter than they were!
"The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells are still darn good reads. So is "The Martian Chronicles," by Ray Bradbury, even though we know the real Mars isn't like that. So is just about every story in "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." So is "Indian Tales," by Jaime De Angulo. "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig still blows my mind. "All the King's Men" and "1984" are good reads but are disturbing, these days. "The Exciting World of Dinosaurs" and "Just So Stories" have dated a bit much, but I read them long before I was 20-25.
What book should everybody read before the age of 21?
ReplyDelete“The Catcher in the Rye” and the whole nutsy-adorable Glass family saga. For my ’50s generation, Salinger was an addiction, and dominated much of our conversations, and even our ambitions. The lives we led, or pretended to lead, seemed to exist under the distracted eye of the disappeared genius. One had to get older to get past him. On the other hand, if you read “Gatsby” before 21, it was a good book, but reading it again 20 years later, you find a great Gatsby.
But remember, I was born in 1929, so little I read as a young man would make sense to a young reader today. I devoured John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and, every bit as appropriate today as in my youth, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
What book should nobody read until the age of 40?
Just about anything you read that shaped your life before you were 40. It’s shocking to find out how much the books have changed as you’ve changed.
--Jules Feiffer interviewed in the New York Times, May 28, 2020
I didn't like "The Catcher in the Rye" as a teenager, and I still don't like it. Holden Caulfield makes no sense to me at all. I'm glad I never had to read it for an English class, because whatever paper I would have written on it would not have been kind.
ReplyDelete"An American Tragedy," on the other hand, dated as it is, seems much more relevant to me. The main theme—that an under-educated and haphazardly brought-up young person is in a vulnerable and therefore dangerous position in life—is something we as a society still don't seem to have completely grasped.
I'm a white, female, straight, suburban-raised, college-educated boomer, if that explains anything.
I was never a fan of "The Catcher in the Rye" either. But then, I'm one of those rare weirdos who never had a problem with meaning and purpose in his life: ever since I was 5, I have wanted to explore the Universe, and in my own way I've had some modest success. I suspect this may be why I've never had even a twinge of Impostor Syndrome, so common among academics: when I do something badly, I know it's because I did it badly, not because I'm not an astronomer, because I clearly am one of those, albeit one who doesn't always do things well---but then, who does?
DeleteNevertheless, I can see why "The Catcher in the Rye" was and remains so popular. The great majority of Americans have no idea what they want to do when they grow up, and often still don't when they're over 50. I will also confess that I had the wonderful luck of being permitted to skip most of middle school in America: I did have one year of it, and didn't like it a bit.