Reading Wednesday
Dec. 24th, 2025 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: Nothing.
Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Well, we're a third of the way in! After coughing up blood repeatedly for the last half a dozen chapters and blaming it on acclimatization to the altitude, our feckless hero has finally seen a doctor (at the TB sanatorium!) and gotten himself formally diagnosed. So now he's stuck up the mountain indefinitely. He's very chill about it though, as the lifestyle—five meals a day, cheap accommodations, lectures, and interesting conversations—is way more fun than going to work. Also he has fallen for another patient, Madame Clavdia Chauchat (great cat name if you have a new adoptee in your life), who despite being Russian, married, uncouth, and outside of his social class, reminds him of a boy he had a crush on as a kid. Our bisexual king Hans Castorp!
Of course I can't help but read modern interpretations into this, and the parallels to the disability community online, the relief of diagnosis after you've experienced mysterious weird symptoms and then connecting with other people who are quietly suffering. Hans Castorp would have loved the internet.
Can a book be both boring and engrossing? Yes.
Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Well, we're a third of the way in! After coughing up blood repeatedly for the last half a dozen chapters and blaming it on acclimatization to the altitude, our feckless hero has finally seen a doctor (at the TB sanatorium!) and gotten himself formally diagnosed. So now he's stuck up the mountain indefinitely. He's very chill about it though, as the lifestyle—five meals a day, cheap accommodations, lectures, and interesting conversations—is way more fun than going to work. Also he has fallen for another patient, Madame Clavdia Chauchat (great cat name if you have a new adoptee in your life), who despite being Russian, married, uncouth, and outside of his social class, reminds him of a boy he had a crush on as a kid. Our bisexual king Hans Castorp!
Of course I can't help but read modern interpretations into this, and the parallels to the disability community online, the relief of diagnosis after you've experienced mysterious weird symptoms and then connecting with other people who are quietly suffering. Hans Castorp would have loved the internet.
Can a book be both boring and engrossing? Yes.
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Date: 2025-12-24 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 02:51 pm (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empusium
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Date: 2025-12-24 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 03:40 pm (UTC)if you want to name your cat after the french army's first LMG...
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Date: 2025-12-24 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 05:26 pm (UTC)https://www.goethe.de/prj/ger/en/ihr/bks/26490960.html
If you're into literary criticism from Mann's day, I can also recommend this work by Hermann J. Weigand (originally published in 1933 but still available in reprint from University of North Carolina Press):
The Magic Mountain: A Study of Thomas Mann's Novel Der Zauberberg