Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

Buddy Read thread for Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I'll be starting it v.soon and hope for company... :o)

I'd be happy to join this buddy read

I'm 18% through and enjoying so far
the ideas are being laid out in neat building blocks and then er... built with!
the portentous "didst", "commenceth", "thou" etc type stuff is a bit wearing though, but that's obviously the chosen style

I wish I had the time. I am prioritising Ulysses, then If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, then Faust. If you can read so slowly that I can join around end of March.....

lol I'm supposed to be reading Ulysses too! (maybe I'll get round to it in late March!)

meanwhile at 25%... Zarathustra is continuing to preach his stuff...
there've been a couple of sections addressing women in a rather cursory/dismissive way that don't sit well with me, but apart from that it's still developing well...

I know what you mean the line "Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution- it is called pregnancy" really struck a chord with me. I don't dismiss the fact that it may be Nietzsche's own personal views on women.

Considering that he proposed 3 times to a women by the name of Lou Salomé that he met through a mutual friend named Richard Wagner. On all three times Salomé denied him to keep their relationship purely professional. Wagner also had affections for Salomé and one day out of the blue they both left Nietzsche. Perhaps the personal vendetta he would of harboured for Salomé after she abruptly left helped to shape the dismissive comments about women in the novel.

35% through now
the way he's systematically demolishing every tenet of conventional religious/moralistic thinking is very impressive - what he's seeming to suggest replace it all is somewhat more questionable atm, but may become clearer...?

finished! herewith my review:
Question the nature of your orders! ...was basically what I got from this. Put aside conventional religious/moral/received wisdom ideas and start again... from the very basics up (what words you use, nature of good/evil, meaning of life - all big stuff) and aim high (very high). The systematic dismantling of the old ways and the setting out of terms and conditions for the re-think all worked nicely early on, but it all got a bit hazy/repetetive later on. The notes at the end helped illuminate some things, but if your book needs 50 pages of explanation, you probably needed to make a better job of writing it in the first place. 5 stars in conception, but heavily marking it down to 3.5 (and rounding down to 3) for aforementioned shortcomings. Very glad I read it though, and will read more Nietzsche (The Antichrist sounds good!).

Please continue this discussion at the Thus Spoke Zarathustra threads here:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Sara - you might want to lock this thread?