www Wednesday

It's been about a month since I put one of these up because I've been reading the same book for about that long. Some thick books, like say a Harry Potter book, I can read very quickly others, like the one I'm getting ready to mention take a bit longer.
What have I read lately? The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. It's an biography of a fictional character named Joesph Kecht who rises to the top of his profession, Magistar Lundi of the Glass Bead Game which is kinda like being the commissioner of MLB. The glass bead game isn't really played in the book and just roughly outlined it's a game for the highest of intellectuals in which they try and put the sum of human knowledge into musical and mathematical equations and then they meditate, ooohhh. The forward of the book pointed out that while most people get the duality of the book and the warning against complete intellectualism most miss the humor. Well I'm happy to say for once I'm with most of the people, I suppose I'm not intelligent enough to get the humor. I really became quite bored with this book by the time I finished it, well sort of finished it. After the main body of the book the were some poems and short stories written by the character Kecht, I read the poems and even like a few of them but I just couldn't get into the short stories so I put it down. After finishing The Glass Bead Game I read C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse A Record of Two Friendships by Miguel Serrano, a book that I thought was going to be biographical of the friendship between Jung and Hesse and while it did touch on this relationship it was actually about the authors friendship with the two men and his inclusion in what they referred to as the hermetic ring. While it was very interesting it was also very out there. These guys were hippies before there were hippies. One neat thing they talked about was the Gnostic god Abraxas, a god that combines creation and destruction, good and evil in one. I don't really have the time or inclination to discuss it here so maybe I'll devote a blog to it some time.
What am I reading now? Well after such heady and far-out reading I decided on something much more pedestrian and am reading Ride The River by Louis L'Amour it's one of the books in the Sackett series.
What am I reading next? Probably Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel.