I am reading “Anna Karenina” and listening to “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann at the moment.
I never read anything of Thomas Mann’s prior to recently reading “Buddenbrooks”. Now I am so taken with the quality of Mann’s writing that I intend reading everything he has written.
Mann was a German writer, and some rate him the finest German writer of all time.
I cannot claim any knowledge about German writers and Mann may be the first I have read.
But the quality of his writing, the descriptions of individuals, the characters, the delicious use of words and phrases, is exceptional.
“The Magic Mountain” and “Buddenbrooks” are gentle books in which not a great deal of happenings or disrupting events occur. They are grander books in looking at slow, subtle changes in society over a period of time.
I was going to stop listening to “The Magic Mountain” as nothing was happening in the early stages. Even now, not a great deal happens save for the central character, Hans, stays in the sanatorium in the Alps.
But the writing is of such beauty, and the unveiling and developing of the central idea of the book is so subtle, that it is easy to stay with it.
So, I carry on and am enjoying it and the tremendous use of words in particular formations and settings.