In the Library
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse, 1922
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 3 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 39k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
I can think. I can wait. I can fast.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Laozi distils into eighty-one verses the river wisdom Siddhartha spends a lifetime learning.
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Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
Hesse sends another seeker through the same spiritual crisis, but the resolution is noisier and stranger.
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About the book
A seeker meets the Buddha himself, the fully awakened one, listens to a teaching that has no flaw in it, and then walks away. He cannot be given wisdom, Siddhartha understands; he must live it, every error of it, in his own body. So he plunges into the world he renounced: the courtesan Kamala teaching him love, the merchant teaching him greed, the dice and the wine teaching him despair, until a son he adores breaks his heart exactly as he once broke his father's. Then he comes to the river, and learns to listen to it. Hesse wrote this slim, luminous book out of his own collapse, and it carries the strange calm of someone who has stopped fighting the current. Its great gift is the river's secret, that time is not real and every voice of the world is one voice saying Om. Few books make peace feel so hard-won, or so close.