Currently reading
Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews and Criticism (A Norton Critical Edition)
The Magic Mountain
Love in the Time of Cholera
Walden, or Life in the Woods, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (Signet classics)
I didn't think there'd be a worse Important Book than Steppenwolf, but sure enough, here it is.Surly primativist lives in woods & muses about beans, ice, animals, and suchlike. There's much consternation regarding the local village, the train, the citylife. Might have more reasonably entitled this Against the Townies.
"Civil Disobediance" is also a waste of space--libertarian propaganda not saved by anti-war & anti-slavery propositions.
Numerous pithy statements in both texts, but godsdammit he's annoying, self-centered, a dullard.