Books

Day 17: The Jungle Book 

A series of fable-ish stories mostly populated by animal characters, including a bunch that don’t star Mowgli. 

The Mowgli stories are the best known for good reason. The Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story is the second strongest. The rest are good but not noteworthy. 

My 6yo and I both had a pretty tepid reaction to it. If you’re out of content to read with your kids, go for it. But here are some alternatives I’d recommend more strongly:

Better orphan story: The Graveyard Book

Better animal story: Watership Down

Better adventure: Treasure Island 

Better Kipling: Captains Courageous 

Four stars carried on Mowgli’s little man cub back

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.

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