I found Steppenwolf to be interesting and bizarre, but mostly full of pretentious wankery, and The Glass Bead Game, which is ostensibly a future biography of the master of an intriguing game and intellectual order, was a tedious slog of boredom which I finished only out of a completionist desire to mark it off on my checklist of finished books. I bounced off Thomas Mann, and this is my second attempt with Hermann Hesse. But my experiences with German literature, at least in translation, have not been salutary. I love the German language (what little I remember of it). Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).
Set in the 23rd century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, which has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish.
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