“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at everything else.”
Back on topic - I would recommend all of Hesse's books. Glassbead is my personal favorite, but I wouldn't start with that.
SPOLIER ALERT - Then, slowly, and in the end, convincingly, you come to know he is writing about you the reader. That is a miracle of writing and time and space.
P.S. I think Catcher in the Rye also does that, if you are late teen, but is a far inferior work, and does not bear reading if you are past 20.
GBG has that dream-like Kafkaesque frustration of having a concrete objective, but not be able to achieve it, even though it should be simple and tangible.
However, in GBG it is all meta: the game is unspecified, the objective is unspecified, the adorable miraculous winning play is unspecified. It is meta-Kafka, which is incredibly doubly frustrating...
SPOLIER ALERT: then, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, a realization creeps over you - GBG is life.
Really a tremendous literary achievement.
I want it to be something workable which helps folks in their use of computers, but the more I work with node programming interfaces and so forth, the more I worry that the fact that there is no universally agreed-upon answer to the question:
>What does an algorithm look like?
and that such systems are strongly-bounded complexity-wise by screen size, that they simply aren't workable beyond small/toy problems and educational usage, i.e., Blockly.
"...um im Gasthaus [...] das zu trinken, was trinkende Männer nach einer alten Konvention »ein Gläschen Wein« nennen."
English: in order to drink in the pub that which drinking men, according to an old convention, call "a little glass of wine."
But trust me, it really works in German.