Thomas Mann C/D S+D

magic mountain is the best book ever written

doctor faustus less so but still impressive

🤔

i mean i'm only halfway through and have just reached the crucial faustus/devil scene so who knows! but since it's structured like a biography the book just kind of blasts linearly through characters and situations. it's always best whenever it's dwelling intensely on something (the lectures on beethoven and beissel (and in fact any descriptions of music, mann was a great music writer), the theology digression, specifically adrian's instructors and classmates) rather than when it's rocketing through the popular salons adrian frequented. the narrator is both unreliable and very earnest, a rough combo to hang out with for a whole novel, even though the earnestness of the narrator's affection for adrian is what causes me to read the novel as queer

magic mountain avoids these obstacles bc the narrator is not a character and bc time in that novel is not so much linear as stopped entirely and you never suddenly encounter a flock of new characters, and the recurrence of familiar characters is either incredibly funny or incredibly moving or incredibly depressing

still, enjoying myself!

the duel in tmm is one of the most devastating things i've ever read

yes!!! god i should reread it, but it would take another year probably

for being a blank Castorp is such a likable dude: curious, amiable, the sort of person who wouldn't be caught dead reading a Mann novel.

castorp looking out into the mountain range and sky beyond his balcony and breaking down and putting the universe back together with his mind = never have i loved a book so much

100 pages into my first Mann, Joseph and his Brothers, and I'm loving it - I do wonder if I'll tire of it over the next 1400 pages but so far it's much lighter and more compelling than I had expected.

^^^ otm. I read it with astonishment and delight in fall 2016. It helped that I skipped Mann's intro and began with the story of Tamar.

As a kid I loved the Old Testament stories of the patriarchs as much as Greek mythology.

I haven't revisited the Old Testament since I was a small kid, and I'm wondering if I should - but I don't feel like I'm missing out on too much so far, despite my hazy memories of who did what.

I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to pick up and read 10 pages when I have a few minutes, too, I'd expected it to be a book that I would have to read in big uninterrupted blocks (although I'm hoping to do some of that).

Not like he is Thomas Mann or anything, but Knausgaard’s second book ‘A Time for Everything’ (pre-My Struggle) incorporates the Old Test stories of both Cain and Abel and Noah, to pretty great effect