Books

Day 18: The Magic Mountain 

A novel about time, illness, death, and the fight for the spirit of Europe. 

If you pick this up, you better be prepared to put your ass into it. Superficially, it’s ~1000 pages of the petty squabbles of affluent Europeans in a sanitorium. But it’s one of those books that professors love where actively decoding it transforms the experience. 

I read it primarily because Joseph Campbell treats it as a peer to Ulysses in Creative Mythology. It falls well short of that mark. 

You probably already know if you should read this. If you’re uncertain, read something else. 

I’m going to reject its classification as great modern literature and I’m still going to give it only three stars for its class. I did the interpretive work and it still fell flat for me. 

If you loved it, please reply to convince me that I’m a phillistine. Until then, I maintain that the only reason to profess fondness for it is to impress others who also think they’re supposed to like it.

Day 19: The Innocents Abroad 

A young Mark Twain makes fun of everything between here and Jerusalem. 

It works as a travelogue, but he also parodies contemporary travel writing, self deprecates hilariously, and evenhandedly roasts everyone he encounters.

I originally meant to read a Bill Bryson book as a palette cleanser following The Magic Mountain, but I discovered I’d run out of them. So I read this instead and liked it so much that I binged five more of his travel books in a row.

I can’t believe these books don’t get talked about more. They’re funny as hell, they’re delightfully anachronistic in their takes, and they’re peerless as time capsules of the travel experience of ~150 years ago.

“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

Five stars for its class. Tender, irreverent, exotic travel writing at its best.

Not often. I averaged one every three days or so during 2024 and now I’m trying to review one per day between now and May. 

But I see the ambiguity now. I’m going to stop labeling these with “Day n:” to mitigate the confusion

I’ve been wanting to read this for a long time, thanks for resurfacing it to the top! Great review.