The Content Reader

I bought this book several years ago and it has been standing on my TBR shelves ever since. I bought it because it is a classic and I want to read a classic from time to time. Furthermore, since I mostly read English classics, it felt refreshing to read a classic from another country. However, every time I felt like reading it, its pure size stopped me from actually picking it up. What a lucky day when I did! 
 Sometimes you start a book with not very high hopes. A classic is always a gamble. Will it still be as fresh as it was at the time of writing, or will it seem hopelessly old fashioned? Buddenbrooks feels as fresh as when it was written. You are stuck from page number 1! 
 The novel tells the story of four generations of a bourgeoisie family in Lübeck during the years 1835-1877. Mann's own family comes from this milieu so he was well aquatinted with it. We meet them at the peak of their success and follow the decline over the years.  Major political and military developme...

On this day in 1911 Thomas Mann visits the Lido in Venice. The visit inspired him to write  Death in Venice. Mann was born in Germany in 1875 and worked as a clerk and studied to become a journalist. In 1898 he published his first collection of stories, followed by his first novel, and one of his most famous ones, Buddenbrooks. He married in 1905 and had six children. He published many essays about great thinkers like Freud, Goethe and Nietsche and continued to write novels, for example The Magic Mountain. In 1929 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mann moved to Switzerland and then on to the U.S. in 1938. There his published Joseph and His Brothers and Doktor Faustus. Thomas Mann died in Switzerland in 1955. Buddenbrooks is on my TBR shelves, so let's see if I can overcome the thick book with small text and read it some time soon!