Mann!!!

Happy 134th birthday to Thomas Mann!!! If you're in the mood for a 20th century bildungsroman, he's your mann (will pay for that).

For fun, try Confessions of Felix Krull. But for the full dose, it's got to be The Magic Mountain. I'm pretty sure that it's not for everyone, but my plan was to read it again this summer. It has many treasures like this:

"Vacuity, monotony, have indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour of the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightlessness, a breath and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those, poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone."

True dat!!