The data is still a few months behind but all signs point to a readership that is buying more books. I have definitely been reading more, though not necessarily from my to-read stack. Friends have been recommending more and of course new books are being published that cry from my attention. I have had a book on my list for a long time, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, that I thought for sure would be on the top of my pandemic reading pile. Two weeks ago, fifteen months in to our protracted collective dance with covid I picked it up. It is a 700-ish page book. It is a Modernist classic and one book American literary types think of when they think of the German novels. It is a luxury for me to devote brain-space to a 700 page book. I bet it is for you, too. I also bet you don’t want to read a book about a man who spends what he thinks will be two weeks on a mountain retreat vacation with his cousin that stretches into seven years. Magic mountain is no exaggeration. One of the novel’s central concerns is time and our modern perception of it. Reading it one hundred years after its first publication and living with the advancements of technology and efficiency in our machines I feel the tension of what does it feel like to fill up my days, to contribute my labor, to care for my body. In 2021, it feels like I am still not going out as much as I like and when I do I am sitting outside, a comfortable set of conditions for me pandemic or not. As I read this book I am considering both the time in which it was written (just after WWI; published in English in 1927) and, with as much perspective as I can, the time I am living. Art still asks these questions about how to live, they seem more complex in light of smart phones and the internet, the immediacy of information and the dissolution of knowledge, but they are still worth asking. I recommend The Magic Mountain for your pandemic bookshelf because art is long and so are pandemics.
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