#magic mountain

thought you might wanted to know :)

YAYA

My family is taking me to Knott’s and CGA so I have a reason to go to west coast six flags parks in general in the future :)

I really liked Twisted Colossus, Full Throttle, and West Coast Racers (didnt get to try X2 :( )

It has notes at the end about things that Thomas Mann references.

It keeps the French dialogue in the book in French.

ITS SO FUCKING GOOD SO FAR.

I will update everyone on the Frau Stohr-isms that it uses for her way of talking, and on if the humour is any good. I haven't started reading it properly yet cause.. sigh. I need to finish Dr Faustus.

BUT I GLANCED THROUGH AND ITS SOOO GOODD, and its so pretty too. Its so nice to hold. I AM SO FUCKING EXCITED YOU DONT UNDERSTAND.

Another Joachim, this time in the mirror! He's starting to looo more and more like a headcanon LMAOO

this doesn't seem like it's a very good book!

you first mentioned it like over a year ago

and my immediate reaction was one of annoyance. i asked what makes them think that, they told me that when they read books, they can't wait to see what happens next and end up finishing it within a few days, with the caveat "maybe i just read books differently, but..."

first, to get it out of the way, my current attention span is shit and i haven't read a novel in 5 years. so i'm already a pretty slow reader—"la place" by annie ernaux, a pocket-sized book of 70 pages that i had to read for class, took me 3 or 4 days of concentrated, obsessive reading. also, i have a life outside of reading LOL.

but, to the precise case: i'd say that magic mountain's not a page-turner, but i argue that not every book needs to be. it's slow, meandering, and thus far irreverent toward any serious conception of "plot" and i love that about it. that's what's allowed me to come back to it several times in the intervening year since i've begun reading it. there's always a certain feeling of being plunged into a ridiculously absurd but uneventful environment, and there's not much forward momentum that makes me feel like i have to "cling on" to my spot in the book. i can reenter this world at will, and mann's prose will reliably do a solid job at plunging me back in. now, a simple attempt at describing things i enjoy about magic mountain: the voice of the narrator is funny and astute, and the world is rich. every time i come back to read it, i have fun.

i think, in a certain way, i feel like i've been "living" with this book. the fact that its presence has punctuated my life over the last year has instilled a feeling of complicity in me, something relatively continuous in my life that otherwise tends to feel full of ruptures and discontinuities. and what's interesting is that i rarely do this: things left unfinished tend to remain unfinished, and when i put something down with the thought, "i'll come back to this later", it typically lies there abandoned for any indefinite amount of time, accumulating guilt until it eventually peaks and veers into indifference (or even resentment), pushing me to abandon it for good. otherwise, if it's boring or just fails to keep my interest, it's a rapid "goodbye". so, magic mountain has been a bit of a strange case in my life, a "project" that i've picked up, put down, abandoned for several months, remembered, picked back up, resumed, read in large chunks, read in small fragments, got stuck on, paused on again, flown through, etc etc etc. and through all of this, i see it fondly. it's a bizarre case, really, and something to behold.