Strange News from Another Planet

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I picked up Strange News from Another Planet from Books Upstairs. It was an impulse buy, as anything by Hermann Hesse that I’ve not read becomes. What a delightful set of stories.

There’s some sort of soulful synchronicity that I feel any time I read a book by Hesse. If I could choose one fictional world to inhabit and never leave it’d be the world of his characters. His writing is plain, yet evocative.

It calls to mind, for me, a simpler life. A life more in touch with the rhythms of what a good life should be. Yes, not all his stories are uplifting. Many aren’t. But there’s this rootedness to the people he writes that I envy or aspire to. The simplicity of life his stories evoke sounds nice, at least amidst all this upheaval and change. His characters inhabit a world that had weight to it.