These Happy Golden Years

These Happy Golden Years: Little House, Book 8 by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I would always turn off the TV when Little House on the Prairie came on. The books, however, are much better. This one tells the story of the author's courtship and marriage. It starts with her accepting a short term winter teaching assignment at a school a dozen miles away. She is a teenager in school herself, barely a few years older than the pupils she is teaching. The family she is boarding with are constantly quarrelling, making the thought of spending weekends with them even more foreboding. She dreams of her dad coming to take her home for the weekend. He doesn't come, but a boy comes instead. He drives the horses through the cold and snow every weekend to bring her back. This boy would later become her wife. There are plenty of other things that happen between the two of them and among other friends and family, with the eventual culmination of their marriage. Though the customs and values are of the 19th century, the feelings and emotions are very similar to those of today.

Johnny Tremain

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

Johnny Tremain is a kid that is down on his luck. He tries to present himself to a wealthy man who is a possible relative and gets accused as a thief. He luckily gets out of it when somebody testifies to his benefit. This angers the relative and he continues to run into trouble. He eventually gets associated with Paul Revere and the American Revolution. I remember not liking this book when we read it back in school. It is a bet better with age, but does drag on.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This novel was extremely popular during World War II. It feels like more of a book of sketches than a full novel. We get insights into the lives of various people living in urban America. Most of the people are from immigrant families. (Though there is one story where somebody who responded that their parents were from Brooklyn when asked where they were from.) Most of the stories involved poverty. A man dying shortly after getting kicked out of his union. Little girls get gifted a doll from others. There are prostitutes trying to make a living, as well as somebody trying to adopt a child from a girl who disgraced her family. People are discovering sexuality and their bodies, but in a world where people don't really talk about it. There are plenty of struggles in adapting to the new world and their language. A girl learns to write and the key difference between imaginative writing and lying.

There are a variety of vignettes in the novel. For some, I would zone out and have no idea what just happened. Others were much more engaging.

The Fountainhead

I started reading Fountainhead a few decades ago. In the process I fell in love with architecture. However, I never did manage to finish it. Now was the time to finally make it through. It was worth it. The book has a strong reputation among the more right-leaning crowd. There are a few libertarian soliloquies. However, there is plenty from the other sides also. 

Fountainhead focuses on the lives of two architects: Howard Roark and Peter Keating. Roark has strong idealistic principles. He feels that architecture is a special art and that an architect is bound to idealistic principles. He will not sacrifice these principles for any whims of those commissioning his work. Because of this, he is kicked out of architecture school. However, he does have great talent and is able to get some jobs, though his principles continue to cause him trouble. Eventually, he joins with a senior modernist architect (who is now out of favor). They do some limited great work together. Roark goes out on his own and gets some commissions from people who agree with his vision. However, he is often ridiculed. When his firm fails, he is perfectly fine doing manual labor. (Maybe this is what made the book so appealing when working a manual labor job.) 

Keating is a friend of Roark from the school days who goes on the opposite path. He does not have the skills of Roark, yet he is willing to schmooze and follow the rules. He graduates from school. He gets a good job. He rises to heights in the architecture profession. He marries a beautiful woman. Along the way he attempts to attract Roark to his path on numerous times. Roark works for his company, yet is turned away. A few times Roark helps Keating on his designs, essentially designing buildings that Keating takes credit for. Roark is fine with this. Keating, however, is much more challenged by Roark.

Dominique Francon is the woman. She is perhaps the most complex. She falls in love with Roark, the anonymous laborer. They are clandestine lovers while at the same time she is complicit in efforts to ruin Roark's career. He is greatly turned on by him, but can't find any way in which she can have any strength in the relationship. She later married Peter Keating. She is.a prize wife, but they have a passionless relationship (in spite of her giving in to his desires.) She divorces him and then is married to a newspaper magnate. This is a more challenging and fulfilling relationship. However, both of them are admirers of Roark and his talents and idealism.

Ellsworth Toohey is the architecture critic who despises Roark. He  helps bring up other architects, such as Keating, only to brush them aside later. He attempts to speak "for the people", but is really just spattering off his own beliefs. He goes through elaborate schemes to bring him down. He encourages a wealthy man to have Roark design a "temple for humanity", then criticizes the structure, ruining Roark and his firm.

It feels that all the other characters are just there to push Roark in one direction or the other. However, he will just not move. He seems to have a case of high functioning autism. He has great skill. He cares that the buildings are right. He does not really care about people or the praise of men. He would much rather have a building built "right" than have credit for it. He is also drawn towards other artists with artwork that he admires. His architectural ideals sometimes are in line with those of society, but more often they are out of step. He has relationships with other people, but seems to have few tight binds. He is perfectly willing to forgive people for atrocious wrongs without holding any grudge. (He remained close to both people who had married the only woman he was close to.) The one thing that he cannot stand is violation of his art. He destroys a building that had been modified from his plan. 

While the book is often held up as a libertarian magnum opus, it can be easily be adapted by the left. Even somebody like Greta Thunberg has some Roark in her. There is a strong unwavering passion. There is little concern for what others say or do. The work is the joy. Many musicians and other artists are focussing on their art today. They refuse to "sell out" and become a Keating. They would much rather stay true like Roark. If fame comes, so be it. They will take it, but won't let it change them.

Glass Bead Game

Castalia is an "intellectual utopia" that exists here on earth a few hundred years from now. The intellectual "elect" get to spend their life studying whatever they so desire. (Many often teach - perhaps this is why the government is willing to fund them.) One of the things they do is play a "Glass Bead Game", a sort of high powered pan-intellectual event. (We hear a lot about it, but don't see many of the details.)

The novel has a few sections. It starts with a justification of the novel, which sets up the values of the futuristic society. This society is an intellectual Utopia where educational elite play the "Glass Bead Game" as a great intellectual exercise. It then proceeds to the main story, the biography of Joseph Knecht from early childhood to his rise as the glass bead master. Then, it fairly seemlessly transitions to the "well known" history of the master as he left the position and the entire "Order". After this section ends with his death, the final section of "posthumous writings of Knecht" begins. This section seems to be the author's dumping ground of earlier approaches for the story. These poems and stories contain some of the same themes as the main novel (and even have the same character), yet carry them out in different means. Did Hesse just dump his original drafts here?

It is always interesting to see "future" situations rooted so firmly in the past. In this novel's future, the Catholic church still maintains a primary position in the intellectual lives of the world. The European countries still exist pretty much as they have. But, there is also the intellectual hermit colony that the novel focuses.

Hesse's ideal world is influenced by both western and eastern thought. It also displays a high level of intellectual bigotry. The arts and creativity are heavily muted. The great masters of the past are respected, but little new output is created. The study of "music", however, is very important, and served as the root of the new "enlightenment." (Despite all the time passed, it seems the intellegencia from 17th-19th century Europe remains the focus of most people's intellectual pursuits.)

The Castalians seem to be real intellectual bigots. They look down on others (even when they say they don't). They are also highly obsessed with their own little trivialities, while not willing to respect those of others. Things like crossword puzzles were viewed as huge time wasters in the past. However, their glass bead game is viewed as a great intellectual endeavor. While they try to be "nice" to the rest of the world, they have set themselves so far apart from it, that they really cannot relate. They have created what is essentially an intellectual religion.

The setting of most of the book could easily be a medieval monastery. Women and modern technology are almost entirely absent through the main portion of the book. Near the end, the author apparently realized this and introduces a few women and has Joseph take off in a car. (For a novel that is supposed to take place in the future, this is seriously rooted in the past. World-building is not one of Hesse's strong points.) He also has him exit the "order" which has become too intellecutual snobbish and unfulfilling. (Perhaps he realized that readers would become disgusted with his intellectual bigots and would need an alternative.) While the ending of the story does do something to help improve the book, the "posthumous writings" destroys the goodwill. The character is just too perfect to be believable, while the events are too contrived, and don't seem to be in any "real" world.

Perelandra

In this second book in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy, the hero gets a quick trip to Venus courtesy of the "angels" he met on Mars. On Venus, he encounters the "Eve" character for the planet. Then, his nemesis from the first book shows up via his rocketship to play the role of the tempter.

The book has the religious overtones typical of C.S. Lewis, played out in a "lite" science fiction universe. The people, rather than technology, are the key here. (I'd almost consider it "interplanetary fantasy")